© [2024]. See details below.
Th AWI-Gen Microbiome Collaboration
The first results of the AWI-Gen Microbiome Collaboration appeared in Nature in 2025:
These hand-crafted wire mats are commissioned
interpretations of research results generated by the AWI-Gen Microbiome
Project. AWI-Gen is a large collaboration, led by Wits with partners at the
University of Limpopo, the African Population Health Research Centre in
Nairobi, the Navrongo Health Research Centre in Ghana and the Clinical Research
Unit of Nanoro, Burkina Faso. The AWI-Gen Microbiome Project partnership
between AWI-Gen and Stanford University is exploring the diversity and impact
of the gut microbiome in African populations. The gut microbiome — comprising
bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses — is intimately tied to human health, so
understanding the diversity in the gut microbiome is very important.
We were honoured by this being chosen as front cover of Nature
The plastic-coated copper telephone wire that is used is now easily available for purchase in large quantities and in a wide range of colours. Initially however, the craft depended on recycled lengths of telephone copper-wire sourced from scrap-metal merchants. The basic materials of this craft were difficult to obtain, and increased demand led to an increase in theft of telephone copper-wire cables (Fick-Jordaan 2005:27). Creative innovation here demanded custom-made materials to grow the craft.
The format of the flat disc-shaped mat is also an innovation emerging from basketry practices, perhaps most visibly the traditional shallow baskets – izimbenge – used to cover beer pots (and of course, the fermentation of beer depends on microbes).
An adaptation of form and function to meet the demands of a contemporary urban market, the mats represent a dynamic and responsive creative practice and an embracing attitude to change and challenge.
The circular weaving process used to create the mats is a natural fit for a physical dimensional representation of these types of scientific charts. The goal of the charts is to communicate, and the use of telephone wire is thus an apt choice of material for these wired representations of the science.
There are three different types of graphs from the AWI-Gen Microbiome that are interpreted here.
The first figure (Fig 1 Phylogeny) represents a phylogenetic tree — the evolutionary relationship between the different species of bacteria found in all our samples where we are able to reconstruct complete genomes. The tree is drawn with the “origin” in the centre, radiating outwards. The inner ring helps us see which phyla are there, the outer ring shows the countries and sites where those species were found.
Fig 1
The second (Fig 2) — called a Krona plot — helps scientists visualise the distribution of microbes in a sample, with each colour representing a different group at different taxonomic scales. In the example below, the innermost black partial ring represents the bacteria in the sample; the different bacterial phyla represented by the magenta, blue, green and mustard sections — as we move from inner to outer parts of the circle, we visualise finer levels of taxa — families, orders, genera and species.
Fig 2
The third is a genome map of a Treponema succinifaciens genome (Fig 3). This bacteria is found mainly in rural populations and the loss of this bacteria in urban populations is associated with negative effects of westernisation of lifestyle. The outer two rings show the genes found on the genome, and the inner two show GC content and skew across the genome.
Fig 3
