I am happy to announce that the first paper out of my Postdoc in Houston is out!
This project was an intense collaborative paper that defines a simple 12-member C. elegans microbiome resource (#CeMbio) for the community. The collaboration was between the Christian-Albrechts University (Kiel, Germany), the Ecole Normale Supérieure, (Paris, France), the University of California, Berkeley (CA, USA) and Baylor College of Medicine. The aim is to offer the C. elegans and the wider microbiome community with a community set composed of twelve fully characterized bacteria as a benchmark tool for host-microbe interactions studies.
These 12 strains were selected to be representative (10/12 core #microbiome families, >65% of diversity), meaningful (isolated from natural worms/ habitats/ mesocosms), & easy to use (all grow on LB).
The CeMbio joins model microbiomes across systems, from mice to drosophila to zebrafish to arabidopsis and beyond, to find mechanisms of impact on health and disease. This sandbox research system offers limitless possibility and offers a common and framework to compare the effect of the microbiome on different aspects of the host life, from life span to resistance to pathogens, to the effect on development and more.
You can access the paper by clicking the button below, and because it’s not every day you get a paper out it’s an extra big button!
Highlights of the community
- All colonize the worm gut alone and come together to form a robust #microbiome, also influenced by host #genetics and #diet.
- Tons of resources, including genomes and metabolic models
- Each have different impacts on host physiology (e.g., faster growth)
- Easy to start (only 12 strains to test) and unlimited combos (12!, or nearly 480 million)
A Microbiome in a Kit
We made sure that whoever wants to play with the system can access it. All the bacterial strains are publicly available at the CGC (link below). And we encourage people to check the wiki here to get extra advice on how to handle the kit, as well as to join the C. elegans slack and join the host-microbe channel to ask questions and share experiences.
ORDER STRAINS — https://cgc.umn.edu/