Publications by authors named "Jessica L Weckhorst"
Article Synopsis
- Host genetics influence the types of microbiomes that can develop in the gut of the nematode C. elegans, impacting their physiological environments.
- A model microbiome was created to study how natural genetic variation affects the assembly of distinct microbiomes, linked to immune and metabolic signaling pathways.
- The research revealed that insulin signaling plays a crucial role in recruiting specific gut bacteria, like the Alphaproteobacteria Ochrobactrum, which is associated with increased growth rates and body size in C. elegans.
Cultivated bacterioplankton representatives from diverse lineages and locations are essential for microbiology, but the large majority of taxa either remain uncultivated or lack isolates from diverse geographic locales. We paired large-scale dilution-to-extinction (DTE) cultivation with microbial community analysis and modeling to expand the phylogenetic and geographic diversity of cultivated bacterioplankton and to evaluate DTE cultivation success. Here, we report results from 17 DTE experiments totaling 7,820 individual incubations over 3 years, yielding 328 repeatably transferable isolates.
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- - The gut microbiome significantly affects the host's biology, impacting health and disease, as well as lifespan and healthspan.
- - Changes in the size or types of microbes in the gut can alter how the host functions and ages.
- - A new method is introduced for studying the microbiome in C. elegans, allowing researchers to investigate its effects on aging and other physiological processes.
High-throughput cultivation studies have been successful at bringing numerous important marine bacterioplankton lineages into culture, yet these frequently utilize natural seawater media that can hamper portability, reproducibility, and downstream characterization efforts. Here we report the results of seven experiments with a set of newly developed artificial seawater media and evaluation of cultivation success via comparison with community sequencing data from the inocula. Eighty-two new isolates represent highly important marine clades, including SAR116, OM60/NOR5, SAR92, Roseobacter, and SAR11.
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