An interdisciplinary perspective of the built-environment microbiome.

The built environment provides an excellent setting for interdisciplinary research on the dynamics of microbial communities. The system is simplified compared to many natural settings, and to some extent the entire environment can be manipulated, from architectural design to materials use, air flow, human traffic, and capacity to disrupt microbial communities through cleaning. Here we provide an overview of the ecology of the microbiome in the built environment.

Session Introduction: Precision Medicine: Multi-modal and multi-scale methods to promote mechanistic understanding of disease.

Precision medicine focuses on developing treatments and preventative strategies tailored to an individual's genomic profile, lifestyle, and environmental context. The Precision Medicine sessions at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) have consistently spotlighted progress in this domain. Our 2025 manuscript collection features algorithmic innovations that integrate data across scales and diverse data modalities, presenting novel techniques to derive clinically relevant insights from molecular datasets.

Reciprocity-assisted ghost imaging through dynamic random media.

Ghost imaging enables the imaging of an object using intensity correlations between a single-pixel detector placed behind the object and a camera that records the light that did not interact with the object. The object and the camera are often placed at conjugate planes to ensure correlated illumination patterns. Here, we show how the combined effect of optical reciprocity and the memory effect in a random medium gives rise to correlations between two beams that traverse the random medium in opposite directions.

Assembling bacterial puzzles: piecing together functions into microbial pathways.

Functional metagenomics enables the study of unexplored bacterial diversity, gene families, and pathways essential to microbial communities. However, discovering biological insights with these data is impeded by the scarcity of quality annotations. Here, we use a co-occurrence-based analysis of predicted microbial protein functions to uncover pathways in genomic and metagenomic biological systems.