Not as often as I would like and fewer entries this time than in the last post, but this is the latest update of my reading list gathering some noteworthy recent publications in the field of microbiome science and other! I hope this will be helpful, please subscribe below the post if you’d like to be kept in the loop of future posts by email. Also feel free to see these posts more regularly on BlueSky.

This month, 2 new collaborative papers out from myself and Camila. Congrats to all, especially the lead authors of both, in Finland and Sweden. We’re delighted to have been part of these massive and fruitful efforts! Stay tuned for more.

🚨New from the lab!🚨

Tammi R, Maukonen M, Kaartinen NE, Koponen K, Niiranen T, Méric G, Albanes D, Eriksson JG, Jousilahti P, Koskinen S, Pajari AM, Knight R, Havulinna AS, Salomaa V, Männistö S. (2026) Interplay between colorectal cancer-related lifestyles and the gut microbiome: an exploratory analysis of metagenomic data. Cancer Causes & Control 37:58 (OA, publisher, altmetrics)

Baldanzi G, Larsson A, Sayols-Baixeras S, Dekkers KF, Hammar U, Nguyen D, Graells T, Ahmad S, Volpiano CG, Méric G, Järhult JD, Tängdén T, Ludvigsson JF, Lind L, Sundström J, Michaëlsson K, Ärnlöv J, Kennedy B, Orho-Melander M, Fall T. (2026) Antibiotic use and gut microbiome composition links from individual-level prescription data of 14,979 individuals. Nature Medicine (in press) [OA, publisher, press release UU, press coverage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (French), 6 (Portuguese), 7 (Spanish), 8 (Greek), 9 (French), 10 (German), 11 (Dutch), 12, 13, 14, 15 (German), 16, altmetrics]

(a) Microbiome and health

Title: Nutrient competition predicts gut microbiome restructuring under drug perturbations
Journal: Cell, Nov 2025
Comment: In this screen, authors look at 707 clinically relevant drugs across stool-derived in vitro gut communities (~5,000 conditions) and assess growth, 16S, and metabolomics. Most compositional shifts were predictable from isolate susceptibility + nutrient competition, where suppressing dominant competitors unlocks resources for others (“competitive release”). Post-drug recovery was driven mainly by strain extinction and reseeding, while resistance emergence was uncommon.

Title: The interplay of sleep characteristics with health factors and gut microbiome
Journal: Nature Communications, Feb 2026
Comment: New study on ~7k individuals highlights link b/ gut microbiome & sleep. Lower microbial diversity correlates with poorer sleep quality, later chronotypes & increased social jet lag. Some Clostridia sp. found to mediate impact of coffee consumption on sleep timing too.

Title: Estropausal gut microbiota transplant improves measures of ovarian function in adult mice
Journal: Nature Aging, March 2026
Comment: Lots to say on this intriguing new study linking gut microbiota to ovarian health in mice. Briefly, FMT between young and estropausal seemed to influence ovarian transcriptomics and inflammation, with effects on fertility.

Title: Evaluating the analytical performance of direct-to-consumer gut microbiome testing services
Journal: Communications Biology, Feb 2026
Comment: In this slightly worrying study, authors sent one unique sample to 7 different consumer microbiome services and got wildly different results, even concluding that there was more variation between companies than what is typically seen between individuals (!). We might hope for clinical testing to be more standardized than consumer services, but if 7 different companies can’t even begin to reach the same conclusion from the same stool sample, we might have problems trusting microbiome data to inform anything health-related.

Title: Commensal enteric virome regulates intestinal carbohydrate digestion and absorption
Journal: Cell Host & Microbe, March 2026
Comment: Interesting new paper using mice models and FVT (fecal virome transplantation) suggests that the commensal enteric virome (largely bacteriophages) could influence small intestinal carbohydrate digestion and absorption independently from the bacteriome(!).

Title: Microbiome research in practice: priorities for clinical translation and impact
Journal: Clinical Microbiology and Infection, Jan 2026
Title: The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP) consensus statement on the definition and scope of gut health
Journal: Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Feb 2026
Comment: Two recent & slightly different but complementary important pieces for microbiome translation: 1) CMI: roadmap on trials/regulation/stakeholders; 2) ISAPP presenting a consensus to define “gut health”.

(b) Other general interests

Title: Does artificial intelligence cause artificial confidence? Generative artificial intelligence as an emerging social referent.
Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2026
Comment: How does AI use for creative use boost self-confidence in our own abilities? Exposing people to creative content that they believed to have been created by AI (vs somebody human) was seen to increase people’s self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities. This seemed to apply for jokes, stories, poetry, and visual art, even when it was completely unwarranted.

Title: Gene-environment equivalence: The fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization
Journal: Plos Medicine, March 2026
Comment: Great perspective from George Davey Smith in Bristol, prompted by the worrying amount of Mendelian Randomization (MR) submissions of dubious quality to journals globally. As an editor myself (for JMM and Microbiology), this is a very well known problem that is difficult to tackle. Citing this brief but clear and impactful work will definitely be part of my future response.