By Yuki Sugimoto, Francine R. Camacho, Shuo Wang, Pranatchareeya Chankhamjon, Arman Odabas, Abhishek Biswas, Philip D. Jeffrey, Mohamed S. Donia

The human microbiome is a vast and complex ecosystem, teeming with microbial life that influences our health in profound ways. While correlations between microbiome composition and disease have been widely studied, the molecular mechanisms behind these relationships remain elusive. One promising avenue for exploration lies in the small molecules produced by these microbes—compounds that mediate interactions both among microbes and between microbes and their human hosts.

In this groundbreaking study, the authors introduce MetaBGC, a hybrid computational and synthetic biology strategy designed to uncover biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) directly from metagenomic sequencing data. These clusters encode the machinery for producing bioactive small molecules, including antibiotics and other therapeutics.

Read the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9176

By Kindel, A. T., Bansal, V., Catena, K. D., Hartshorne, T. H., Jaeger, K., Koffman, D., McLanahan, S., Phillips, M., Rouhani, S., Vinh, R., & Salganik, M. J.

Researchers rely on metadata systems to prepare data for analysis. As the complexity of data sets increases and the breadth of data analysis practices grow, existing metadata systems can limit the efficiency and quality of data preparation. This article describes the redesign of a metadata system supporting the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study on the basis of the experiences of participants in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors demonstrate how treating metadata as data (i.e., releasing comprehensive information about variables in a format amenable to both automated and manual processing) can make the task of data preparation less arduous and less error prone for all types of data analysis. The authors hope that their work will facilitate new applications of machine-learning methods to longitudinal surveys and inspire research on data preparation in the social sciences. The authors have open-sourced the tools they created so that others can use and improve them.

Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118817378