Alise PonseroQuadram Institute
Alise Ponsero
PhD
About
34
Publications
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Introduction
Alise Ponsero currently works in the Bioinformatics core the Quadram Institute of Biosciences in Norwich, UK. Alise's research interests are environmental microbiology and virology, and algorithm development for metagenomic analysis.
Publications
Publications (34)
The human gut microbiota is central in regulating all facets of host physiology, and in early life it is thought to influence the host’s immune system and metabolism, affecting long-term health. However, longitudinally monitored cohorts with parallel analysis of faecal samples and health data are scarce. In our observational study we describe the g...
Background The vertebrate gut microbiome plays crucial roles in host health and disease. However, there is limited information on the microbiomes of wild birds, most of which is restricted to barcode sequences. We therefore explored the use of shotgun metagenomics on the faecal microbiomes of two wild bird species widely used as model organisms in...
Imbalanced microbiota may contribute to the pathophysiology of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), thus fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) has been suggested as a potential treatment. Previous studies on the relationship between clinical improvement and microbiota after FMT have been inconclusive. In this study, we used 16S rRNA gene amplicon and s...
Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) are prevalent in the infant gut microbiota and make up the intestinal resistome, representing a community ARG reservoir. This study focuses on the dynamics and persistence of ARGs in the early gut microbiota, and the effect of early exposures therein. We leveraged 2,328 stool metagenomes from 475 children in the H...
Despite the growing interest in the role of the gut virome in human health and disease, identifying viral sequences from human gut metagenomes remains computationally challenging due to underrepresentation of viral genomes in reference databases. Several recent large-scale efforts have mined human gut metagenomes to establish viral sequence catalog...
Background
Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), their determinants, infant gut microbiota and health are under extensive research; however, seldom jointly addressed. Leveraging data from the HELMi birth cohort, we investigated them collectively, considering maternal and infant secretor status.
Methods
HMO composition in breastmilk collected 3 month...
Background and aims
The acquisition and gradual maturation of gut microbial communities during early childhood is central to an individual’s healthy development. Bacteriophages have the potential to shape the gut bacterial communities. However, the complex ecological interactions between phages and their bacterial host are still poorly characterize...
Aim: Comparative metagenomic analysis requires measuring a pairwise similarity between metagenomes in the dataset. Reference-based methods that compute a beta-diversity distance between two metagenomes are highly dependent on the quality and completeness of the reference database, and their application on less studied microbiota can be challenging....
Background:
Although the infant gut microbiota has been extensively studied, comprehensive assessment on the microbiota determinants including technical variables has not been performed in large infant cohorts.
Methods:
We studied the effect of 109 variables on the 16S rRNA gene amplicon-based gut microbiota profiles of infants sampled longitudi...
The human microbiome is the complex community of commensal, pathogenic, and symbiotic microorganisms that literally share our body space. The human microbiome has emerged in the past few decades as central to human health and disease. Studies have shown that the human microbiome is involved in various physiological processes, including digestion, m...
Introduction
As new computational tools for detecting phage in metagenomes are being rapidly developed, a critical need has emerged to develop systematic benchmarks.
Methods
In this study, we surveyed 19 metagenomic phage detection tools, 9 of which could be installed and run at scale. Those 9 tools were assessed on several benchmark challenges. F...
Background
The proliferation of metagenomic sequencing technologies has enabled novel insights into the functional genomic potentials and taxonomic structure of microbial communities. However, cyberinfrastructure efforts to manage and enable the reproducible analysis of sequence data have not kept pace. Thus, there is increasing recognition of the...
Background and aims
Birth mode and other early life factors affect a newborn's microbial colonization with potential long-term health effects. Individual variations in early life gut microbiota development, especially their effects on the functional repertoire of microbiota, are still poorly characterized. This study aims to provide new insights in...
Marine microbial ecology requires the systematic comparison of biogeochemical and sequence data to analyze environmental influences on the distribution and variability of microbial communities. With ever-increasing quantities of metagenomic data, there is a growing need to make datasets Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) acros...
Lichen thalli are formed through the symbiotic association of a filamentous fungus and photosynthetic green alga and/or cyanobacterium. Recent studies have revealed lichens also host highly diverse communities of secondary fungal and bacterial symbionts, yet few studies have examined the viral component within these complex symbioses. Here, we desc...
Lichen thalli are formed through the symbiotic association of a filamentous fungus and photosynthetic green alga and/or cyanobacterium. Recent studies have revealed lichens also host highly diverse communities of secondary fungal and bacterial symbionts, yet few studies have examined the viral component within these complex symbioses. Here, we desc...
Background
Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) account for the majority of all limb amputations and hospitalizations due to diabetes complications. With 30 million cases of diabetes in the USA and 500,000 new diagnoses each year, DFUs are a growing health problem. Diabetes patients with limb amputations have high postoperative mortality, a high rate of sec...
Infections are a serious health concern worldwide, particularly in vulnerable populations such as the immunocompromised, elderly, and young. Advances in metagenomic sequencing availability, speed, and decreased cost offer the opportunity to supplement or even replace culture-based identification of pathogens with DNA sequence-based diagnostics. Ado...
A wealth of viral data sits untapped in publicly available metagenomic data sets when it might be extracted to create a usable index for the virological research community. We hypothesized that work of this complexity and scale could be done in a hackathon setting. Ten teams comprised of over 40 participants from six countries, assembled to create...
Background
Scientists have amassed a wealth of microbiome datasets, making it possible to study microbes in biotic and abiotic systems on a population or planetary scale; however, this potential has not been fully realized given that the tools, datasets, and computation are available in diverse repositories and locations. To address this challenge,...
Background
Shotgun metagenomics provides powerful insights into microbial community biodiversity and function. Yet, inferences from metagenomic studies are often limited by dataset size and complexity and are restricted by the availability and completeness of existing databases. De novo comparative metagenomics enables the comparison of metagenomes...
Big-data analytics platforms, such as Hadoop, are appealing for scientific computation because they are ubiquitous, well-supported, and well-understood. Unfortunately, load-balancing is a common challenge of implementing large-scale scientific computing applications on these platforms. In this paper we present the design and implementation of Libra...
The transcriptome of Frankia alni strain ACN14a was compared between in vitro ammonium-replete (N-replete) and ammonium-free dinitrogen-fixing (N-fixing) conditions using DNA arrays. A Welch-test (p < 0.05) revealed significant upregulation of 252 genes under N-fixing vs. N-replete (fold-change (FC) ≥ 2), as well as significant downregulation of 48...
A plethora of tools exist for identifying phage sequences in bacterial genomes, single cell amplified genomes, and host-associated and environmental metagenomes. Yet because the genetics of phages and their hosts are closely intertwined, distinguishing viral from bacterial signal remains an ongoing challenge. Further the size, quantity and fragment...
In the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), Ero1 catalyzes disulfide bond formation and promotes glutathione (GSH) oxidation to GSSG. Since GSSG cannot be reduced in the ER, maintenance of the ER glutathione redox state and levels likely depends on ER glutathione import and GSSG export. We used quantitative GSH and GSSG biosensors to monitor glutathione imp...
Significance:
Disturbance of glutathione metabolism is a hallmark of numerous diseases, yet glutathione functions are poorly understood. One key to this question is to consider its functional compartmentation. In the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), protein folding involves disulfide bond formation catalyzed by the thiol oxidase Ero1 and proteins from...
We present the genome of a cyanosiphovirus (KBS2A) that infects a marine Synechococcus sp. (strain WH7803). Unique to this genome, relative to other sequenced cyanosiphoviruses, is the absence of elements associated
with integration into the host chromosome, suggesting this virus may not be able to establish a lysogenic relationship.
The distribution of cyanomyoviruses was estimated using a quantitative PCR (qPCR) approach that targeted the g20 gene as a proxy for phage. Samples were collected spatially during a >3,000 km transect through the Sargasso Sea and temporally during a gyre-constrained phytoplankton bloom within the southern Pacific Ocean. Cyanomyovirus abundances wer...