Lifelong relationship with microbes, now studying them for a living. Assistant Professor at MedUni Graz. Opinions are my own. He/him 🦠+💻=❤️
More socials at cdiener.com. Lab website at dienerlab.com.
Christian Diener
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Interesting article by Glass et al. on using metabolic modeling to find new antibiotics for the vaginal microbiome.
I like how all the p-values are like 10^-300. Take that power analysis.
New online! Sequencing what we eat
Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
New online! Next-generation probiotics: an outlook into current applications and future developments
Very excited to share our new paper out in Nature. Congrats to Xiaoqian (Annie) Yu and all the coauthors. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Christian Diener
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Published online: 19 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41575-026-01215-7Dietary assessment commonly relies on asking people what they remember eating. Genomic methods can change this assessment, paralleling how DNA sequencing revolutionized microbiology. By identifying consumed foods directly from stool, these approaches offer an objective, scalable alternative that gastroenterology researchers can begin using today.
Milliardenkürzungen bei Unis? Das hätte massive Folgen für die Steiermark!
Setzen wir bei den Demos ein Zeichen:
🟢 Wien: 27. Mai 2026, 13 Uhr, Hauptgebäude der Universität Wien, Universitätsring 1
🟢 Graz: 28. Mai 2026, 14.30 Uhr, Wilhelm-Fischer-Allee am Stadtpark, Graz
#unisretten
Christian Diener
Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 08 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41579-026-01311-0In this Review, Kern, Tofield, Frame and Elinav discuss recent advances in the design of next-generation probiotics, from identification of candidates to therapeutic applications across diverse disease contexts, and highlight major challenges and the potential of artificial intelligence to develop effective, personalized probiotics with therapeutic functions.
Genome-wide selective sweeps commonly occur in the human gut microbiome and can spread across the world within decades to produce epidemic-like population structures.
How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
Guim Aguadé-Gorgorió
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology
Paper out: Profiling of lytic phage infection in individual B. fragilis cells with bacterial scRNA-seq. Congratulations Anika Gupta, Norma Morella, @monochamussutor.bsky.social Dmitry Sutormin et al, in collaboration with Georg Seelig (UW) and Neel Dey (Fred Hutch). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Nature Reviews Microbiology
Martin Polz
Out Now! Genome-scale metabolic modelling identifies vaginal microbiome members as potential probiotics #MicroSky
The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it
Phage-bacteria interactions are typically studied in bulk culture, which obscures cell-cell differences. Here the authors study phage-bacteria interactions using single-cell transcriptomics, identifyi...
Indeed..
here is "generate the first page of a great Nature paper that will get lots of citations. It must be very novel."
Medizinische Universität Graz
A. Murat Eren (Meren)
Nature Microbiology, Published online: 12 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02380-wMetabolic modelling and experimental validation reveal that current probiotics lack the functional diversity of native microbes, identifying vaginal species that inhibit Gardnerella vaginalis through the dual mechanisms of resource competition and d-lactic acid production.
