Nandita recently had the pleasure of writing a persective on a recent paper by Dapa et al. on the evolutionary dynamics of gut microbiota in response to diet. Dapa et al’s work highlights the importance of studying evolution of the gut microbiome to better understand how phenotypes impact our microbiota and vice versa. Remarkably, the authors find that diet is a driver of evolutionary change, and, remarkably, nucleotide-level signatures are a biomarker of host phenotype.

Adaptation of gut microbiota in response to diet B. thetaiotaomicron (red circles) evolves new genetic adaptations (yellow thunderbolts) in the presence of a high-fat and low-fiber Western diet.

This October, Nandita spoke at the ISB virtual microbiome symposium featuring talks from the field on evolution in commensal gut bacteria on short and long time scales. A link to view the talks is available here: https://youtu.be/u12G6tSLpjY.

We are pleased to share our latest manuscript on Rapid evolution and strain turnover in the infant gut microbiome. In this paper, we quantify differences in the tempo and mode of evolution in the infant compared to adult gut microbiomes and find that evolution and strain turnover is significantly faster in infants and decays with life stage. Please check out our manuscript and send us any comments!

Figure 2 from Chen and Garud. (B) Rates of number of SNV changes per day due to evolution, (C) rates of number of strain replacements per day, and (D) rates of gene gains and loss per day.

We are very sad to bid Daisy Chen farewell, but excited for her next steps as a PhD student at UCSD. Daisy has been with the lab since its inception in 2019 and has contributed a tremendous amount to its growth. Stay tuned for her papers, which are forthcoming!

Nandita was recently named a Hellman Fellow at UCLA! This grant will fund work in the lab on Uncovering the Landscape of Mutations in the Human Gut Microbiome.