Genomics & qPCR surveillance of soils, sludge & sewage 🏞️💩😷 | RNA viruses, AMR genes & mobile elements in environmental microbiomes | Research Fellow @bangor.ac.uk | Building the evidence base for wastewater-informed public health in Wales 🏴
Luke Hillary
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📢 New preprint is out on bioRxiv 📢:
How much does virome prep influence our view of the human gut virome?
Short answer: a lot.
Long answer:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Different methods lead to distinct community structures, richness, and major virus-host abundance patterns.
🧵 1/5
Firing up the MDA kit? We got STRONG compositional distortions and reduced richness. Whilst this effect is generally known, MDA continues to be used. Filtering out ssDNA viruses partially compensated for this, but at a cost in downstream data analyses.
🧵 2/5
DNase treating your viromes? Unlike soil viromes, this looks like it might not have as big an effect in stool (at least in our study).
🧵 3/5
Viromes and metagenomes captured partially overlapping but differently biased components of the total gut viral community. This has significant implications for inter-study comparisons.
🧵 4/5
Huge thanks to co-authors Trina Knotts, Sean Adams, Mohammed Ali, @mattolm.bsky.social, and to my PI, Joanne Emerson, who handled all of the wet-lab sample processing.
🧵 5/5
UKRI's chief executive said recently that the UK "may wish to explore" paring back its association to the EU's research programme, to make it partial.
That would be a "profound strategic error", critics now warn.
By @clanicholson.bsky.social
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...
The Metagenome Stability Diagram uses gene markers across ecosystems to understand how environmental conditions constrain metabolic activity in microbiomes. 🖥️🧬🦠
https://jgi.doe.gov/user-science/science-stories/data-discovery-tool-helps-identify-microbial-roles-within-metagenomes
