The Bayer Foundation announced today that Ruth Ley is the 2020 recipient of the Otto Bayer Award. We are very grateful to the foundation for this recognition of the lab’s work. Read the announcement here: https://www.bayer-foundation.com/otto-bayer-award-goes-ruth-ley

In this review, Taichi Suzuki takes on the challenge of thinking through how the microbiome can play a role in the process of human genetic adaptation to new environments. When humans spread out across the globe they encountered new diets,...

Last week the institute held its annual PhD symposium online, to great success. Congratulations to Tanja Schön for winning Best Poster, Michael Bell for winning Best Short Talk, and Albane Ruaud for Runner-Up in the Long Talk category. The 2020...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.10.376293v1 The Archaea remain more mysterious than the Bacteria as they are comparatively under-studied. This is changing thanks for next generation sequencing. However, little is known about archaeal communities associated with vertebrates, especially due to strong Bacteria-biases of standard “universal”...

Here is a story of a pathobiont returning to the sea. It started with polar bear feces collected off the arctic ice: diversity dominated by Psychrobacter. Did these ride the bear or come from the ice? Find out here in...

Ruth was elected to the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences) in June. The Leopoldina originated in 1652 as a classical scholarly society and now has 1,600 members from almost all branches of science. In 2008, the Leopoldina was appointed...

Here Nick Youngblut uses tree-based approaches for comparing human gut metagenomes. This is similar to using UniFrac for 16S rRNA datasets. And similarly, it works really well for discerning samples by disease, for instance. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.207811v1

We know from previous work that people with a lactase-non-persistent (LNP) genotype have more Bifidobacteria in their guts, but what kinds? Victor Schmidt and fellow post doc Hagay Enav dive into this question using samples from TwinsUK. They use genome-capture...

This week saw the arrival of our newest addition: a scimaX mass spectrometer! After years of planning (and a pandemic), installation was completed this week by the experts at Bruker. The first of its kind in Germany, scimaX is a...

New on BioRxiv: Nick Youngblut followed up on his recent Nature Communications publication that revealed a plethora of new microbial diversity for gut microbiomes of wild animals spanning 5 classes of vertebrates. Here, the whole collection of samples was shotgun...

We are pleased to see Liz Johnson and Stacey Heaver’s paper on Bacteroides sphingolipids out in Nature Communications! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16274-w And if you’d like to read more, see the “Behind the paper” blog here: go.nature.com/3fpjUjM

A big congratulations to Stacey Heaver who successfully defended her PhD this week! It certainly was an affair to remember, with COVID-19 forcing the seminar to be held via video conference with participants taking part from all corners of the...

Congratulations are in order for Claudia Frick, who is the recipient of a CMFI Young Investigator’s Grant! Claudia is a senior postdoc in the Ley Lab and investigates the role of sphingolipids in bacteria-host interaction. This award will assist her...