Moore Notes 4 9 14

Group Call

• Participants: Katie, Tom, Dongying, Stacia, Stephen, Patrick, Josh, Ladan, Sarah

• In-person meeting May 8

• Progress report due June 1

• Patrick/Stephen: Keystone meeting update
  • Topics: Chemical transformations in the microbiome
    • Drug metabolism, other metabolic pathways
    • Methods for identifying small molecules that promote communities to grow together
    • Not much pathway identification/prediction of pathways (data still coming)
    • Identifiability of microbiomes, forensics (1/100 - 1/1000 vs. 1/10000 with human DNA)
    • Temporal variation, longitudinal data: random, short-term fluctuations around a (somewhat stable) mean
      • Mariel leaving end of May, so should we get mouse data processed asap for longitudinal modeling?
      • Caporaso et al. 2011. Moving pictures of the human microbiome: http://genomebiology.com/2011/12/5/r50
      • Power analysis
      • Gold standard data sets? In vitro mock communities (bioreactor?), simulations of longitudinal studies (new software?)
      • Community ecology models for disturbances, recolonization
  • Techniques: metabolomics, genome-mining
  • American gut data now available

• Josh: correlating land and marine microbiomes
  • Is there spatial auto-correlation between terrestrial and marine sites?
  • Is this higher when there is a delta?
  • Taxonomic (e.g., EMP 16S data) vs. functional (e.g., antibiotic resistance genes)
  • Sourcetracker tool (classifier, not biogeographic model)

• Future calls
  • Next time: Shotmap call
  • Two weeks: Planning for May meeting