Best Practice Guidelines for Collecting Microbiome Samples in Research Studies.

Microbiome research has the potential to provide valuable information regarding the complex relationship between microbial communities and the human body. To help facilitate the translation of this potentially revolutionary research to clinical medicine, common guidelines and best practices are necessary. These guidelines should be based on the key findings of recent research in the field and address the primary areas of discrepancy in the previously published literature.

Distributed information encoding and decoding using self-organized spatial patterns.

Dynamical systems often generate distinct outputs according to different initial conditions, and one can infer the corresponding input configuration given an output. This property captures the essence of information encoding and decoding. Here, we demonstrate the use of self-organized patterns that generate high-dimensional outputs, combined with machine learning, to achieve distributed information encoding and decoding.