Analysis of early childhood intestinal microbial dynamics in a continuous-flow bioreactor.

Background: The human gut microbiota is inoculated at birth and undergoes a process of assembly and diversification during the first few years of life. Studies in mice and humans have revealed associations between the early-life gut microbiome and future susceptibility to immune and metabolic diseases. To resolve microbe and host contributing factors to early-life development and to disease states requires experimental platforms that support reproducible, longitudinal, and high-content analyses.

The microbiome diversifies -acyl lipid pools - including short-chain fatty acid-derived compounds.

-acyl lipids are important mediators of several biological processes including immune function and stress response. To enhance the detection of -acyl lipids with untargeted mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, we created a reference spectral library retrieving -acyl lipid patterns from 2,700 public datasets, identifying 851 -acyl lipids that were detected 356,542 times. 777 are not documented in lipid structural databases, with 18% of these derived from short-chain fatty acids and found in the digestive tract and other organs.

Deep integration of low-cost liquid handling robots in an industrial pharmaceutical development environment.

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly embracing laboratory automation to enhance experimental efficiency and operational resilience, particularly through the integration of automated liquid handlers (ALHs). This paper explores the integration of the low-cost Opentrons OT-2 liquid handling robot with F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG's in-house workflow orchestration software, AutoLab, to overcome barriers to lab automation.

isolateR: an R package for generating microbial libraries from Sanger sequencing data.

Motivation: Sanger sequencing of taxonomic marker genes (e.g. 16S/18S/ITS/rpoB/cpn60) represents the leading method for identifying a wide range of microorganisms including bacteria, archaea, and fungi.

Burden of recreational water illness due to exposure to cyanobacteria and their toxins in freshwater beaches in Canada: protocol of a prospective cohort study.

Introduction: Cyanobacterial blooms are increasingly common in freshwater sources used for swimming and other recreational water contact activities in Canada. Many species of cyanobacteria can produce toxins that affect human and animal health, but there are limited data on the risk of illness associated with water contact at impacted beaches.

Methods And Analysis: This study will investigate the incidence of recreational water illness due to exposure to cyanobacterial blooms and their toxins in four targeted and popular freshwater beaches in Ontario, Manitoba and Nova Scotia, Canada.