In a paper published online in advance in PNAS this week, a team led by investigators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign surveys six gastrointestinal microbiomes drawn from three different domesticated vertebrates — two swine, two cattle, and two chickens — using "carefully curated deep 16S rRNA hypervariable tag sequencing data." The authors say that their analyses "strongly suggest that these microbiomes have, in fact, been assembled through processes that involve a