Nick Ilott
nickilott.bsky.social
Nick Ilott
@nickilott.bsky.social
Scientist studying microbiome-host interactions in primary sclerosing cholangitis at the University of Oxford.

#microbiome #scRNAseq #bioinformatics #metagenomics #metabolomics #transcriptomics

I also like drawing: https://www.instagram.com/ilottnick21
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Throwing it back a few weeks to the final meeting of the CRUK grand challenges optimisticc study! We had a great time in Boston discussing progress in the colorectal cancer & microbiome field - it’s been a real pleasure being part of this group!🧫🫶
@elayton13.bsky.social
October 27, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Interested in joining the Powrie Lab? We’re looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to study the neutralisation capacity of human anti-IL-10 autoantibodies. You’ll be part of our new MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology!🧫🦠

Find out more here & apply by 11th Nov: bulletin.ndorms.ox.ac.uk/c/126QDJVBd0...
bulletin.ndorms.ox.ac.uk
October 29, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
A full house today at Meeting Minds Oxford to hear Kevin Foster talk about the gut microbiome and his group's cutting edge research on microbial diversity.

And there was also time to mention our amazing history of microbial research! 🦠

@oxfordalumni.bsky.social
September 20, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
#PooTriviaQuiz is coming up for #BiologyWeek

Sponsored by Wooclap - helps people teach and learn.

Register at pootriviaquiz.eventbrite.co.uk

It's free and family-friendly but you do need to register to reserve a space on the Zoom call.
September 15, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
We had a fab time at our student symposium (KISS2025) this week! We really enjoyed everyone’s talks and poster presentations, with some super exciting keynote speakers! Amit, Natasha, and Rachel gave great overview talks and poster presentations on their DPhil projects👩‍🔬🧠
@kiroxford.bsky.social
September 19, 2025 at 9:31 AM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
September meant it was the Powrie labs turn to organise an institute social! We hosted “The Great Kennedy Bake Off” and had lots of tasty entries, as well as a cake decorating competition! Congratulations to our winners - Lynn for best bake and Osheen for best decorating!🍰🍪🧁
@kiroxford.bsky.social
September 20, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Want to coordinate our exciting seminar series, and be the go-to person for events at the Kennedy Institute?

We're hiring an Administrative Assistant (Meetings, Events, and Communications!)

Apply by 12 Sept. 👇

www.kennedy.ox.ac.uk/jobs/adminis...
Administrative Assistant (Meetings, events, and Communications) (181623)
The Administrative Assistant will lead the scheduling and administration of external and internal seminars, with management and faculty meetings, social events, and special events such as institute re...
www.kennedy.ox.ac.uk
September 2, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
We had a fab time running The Gut Florists stall at Green Man Festival! From talking all things microbiome, painting gut microbes, making bacterial pom-poms, or doing microbe word searches, we had something for everyone & loved chatting to you!🧫💐🦠🌼
@britsocimm.bsky.social
@greenmanfest.bsky.social
August 18, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
If you haven’t already signed up to The Microbiome Innovation One Health Conference 2025 yet, this is your reminder to! Based in Oxford on the 15th/16th of September, it’ll be a great opportunity to get up to date on recent progress in the field of Microbiome Science🦠🧫

web.cvent.com/event/9d50cf...
Microbiome Innovation One Health Conference 2025.
web.cvent.com
July 14, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Come join us in Oxford for web.cvent.com/event/9d50cf...
Microbiome Innovation One Health Conference 2025.
web.cvent.com
July 10, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
It was great to see Amit, one of our final year DPhil students, presenting his work at the BBSRC Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP symposium last week!☀️

@amit-halkhoree.bsky.social @kiroxford.bsky.social
July 10, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
🧬 Sharing an exciting new pre-print from the team! We stimulated healthy blood cells with 11 different treatments used in immunology research & created single-cell profiles to compare responses. Hopefully an invaluable resource for immunology/disease researchers 📖 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Intra- and intercellular immune responses across diverse in vitro stimuli and inflammatory disease
In vitro stimulation of healthy human immune cells is commonly used to reproduce the immune states observed in disease, both to understand pathology and to test therapeutic approaches. However, experiments typically focus on individual cell types and stimuli and a comprehensive cellular comparison of common immunomodulators and their relevance to disease is lacking. To this end, we performed integrated single-cell transcriptomic profiling of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells treated with 11 different common in vitro stimuli, totalling over 150,000 cells from 21 immune cell subtypes. Comparative analysis of the immunomodulations revealed their shared and unique pathways, for instance stimulation via the T cell receptor (anti-CD3, CytoStimTM) and IFN-α induced broad activation signatures including off-target effects across multiple cell types, whereas TNF-α and LPS elicited more specific responses. Ligand-receptor interaction mapping also uncovered the common and distinct intercellular signalling pathways across stimuli. Comparing the stimuli to patient samples enabled identification of specific inflammatory disease features best replicated by each. For example, IFN-α stimulation recapitulated signatures of SLE across cell types, whereas LPS induced SLE-like changes specifically within monocytes. Comparative cell-cell network analysis showed that in vitro stimuli were able to recreate some, but not all, aspects of intercellular interactions upregulated in SLE, highlighting the limitations of these model systems. This resource provides new insights into the similarities and differences of established immune stimuli at cellular resolution and facilitates appropriate use of in vitro systems to study pathways relevant to disease. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
www.biorxiv.org
July 7, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Happy World Microbiome Day! We celebrated this year with some delicious petri dish cheesecakes, with everyone “streaking” some plates whilst learning about the microbiome!🧫🍰

@microbiologysociety.org @kiroxford.bsky.social @ndorms.bsky.social
June 27, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
So nice to have the work from my PhD on faecal microRNAs featured in The Scientist magazine www.the-scientist.com/profiling-mi...
Profiling MicroRNA from Poo to Understand Gut Health and Disease
Improving the detection of small RNAs in fecal samples paves the way for novel, non-invasive biomarkers to monitor intestinal health.
www.the-scientist.com
June 25, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
It’s been a great week in Prague for the Food, Microbiota, and Immunity conference! Claire gave a great talk and Dehui won an award for her poster presentation👏☀️🦠 #FMI2025 @dehuic.bsky.social
June 20, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Please read about how we think microbial metabolism might help us understand microbiomes a bit better!

Also, please appreciate the mountain goat in Fig 1 ⛰️🐐 and that it also represents my joy for trail running and the mountains 😁
Metabolic ecology of microbiomes: Nutrient competition, host benefits, and community engineering

Review by Erik Bakkeren, Vit Piskovsky, and Kevin R. Foster
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
June 11, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
The news is out now 😉

We are proud to say we, the 3Lauras, have been awarded the @ukri.org “Advancing Culture” 2025 Impact Award for our work trying to improve caring provisions at conferences, grant funding & policy here at Carers in STEMM 👏

The recognition is fantastic - 🙏 !
June 11, 2025 at 6:28 AM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Thrilled to share our latest review on how the gut microbiome connects diet to health, now published in Nature Reviews Gastro & Hepa! Honored to co-sign this piece with outstanding PIs @eranelinav.bsky.social @jfcryan.bsky.social Yolanda Sanz Mélanie Deschasaux Rebekka Lambrecht rdcu.be/epret
The gut microbiome connects nutrition and human health
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology - In this Review, Sanz and colleagues discuss how diet shapes the gut microbiome, the role of diet–microbiome interactions on the immune,...
rdcu.be
June 4, 2025 at 7:56 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
We had a great time showing off our fabulous Gut Wall and making microbe pom poms with members of the public at the BRC Health Research Showcase last week at Oxford’s Westgate shopping centre!🧫🦠

@oxfordbrc.bsky.social @kiroxford.bsky.social
@gemmala.bsky.social
@amit-halkhoree.bsky.social
June 3, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.
May 31, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
(1/6) 🌟 Excited to share our new paper!
Advancing microbiome safety assessments: opportunities, challenges & recommendations 🧫🦠

This work came out of an academic–industry workshop hosted by @microbiologysociety.org in early 2024.

🔗 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Assessing the safety of microbiome perturbations
Everyday actions such as eating, tooth brushing or applying cosmetics inherently modulate our microbiome. Advances in sequencing technologies now facilitate detailed microbial profiling, driving inten...
www.microbiologyresearch.org
May 27, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Nick Ilott
Sharing some more pics from a fantastic week in Alghero for the ENII Advanced Immunology Summer School - we are all very sad to be leaving sunny Sardinia behind! Thanks to the wonderful organisers and speakers for an amazing week👩‍🔬🇮🇹🧑‍🔬

@efis-immunology.bsky.social
May 29, 2025 at 3:56 PM