2019 is comming to an end, but the holidays are not the only reason to celebrate in the Ley Lab; we close the year with three new publicatons!

First, a literature review of one of our favorite taxa, the family Christensenellaceae (https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-019-0699-4). In this review we discuss the heritability and ecology of these microorganisms in the human gut across populations and studies, its association with human health in diverse disease contexts such as obesity, metabolic disease and inflammatory bowel disease, and argue for further investigation into the Christensenellaceae.

Next, a study of the interaction and dynamics of immunoglobulins and the microbiota taxa in the gut of human infants (https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00612-19). By measuring the profiles of IgA, IgM, and IgG in the developing gut, we found that all antibodies decreased in concentration with age, but were augmented by breastmilk feeding. The microbiota coated with either IgA or IgM were consistently enriched by Bifidobacteria and Enterobacteriaceae species, while IgG levels instead correlated with Haemophilus species.

Last but not least, a pipeline for the retrieval of genomes from public repositories and the construction of custom databases for metagenome profilers (https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz899). This tool allows to incorporate novel genomes into the analysis of microbial communities.