Related topics: microbes

The difficult question of Clostridium difficile

The bacterium Clostridium difficile causes antibiotic-related diarrhoea and is a growing problem in the hospital environment and elsewhere in the community. Understanding how the microbe colonises the human gut when other ...

Fecal transplants let packrats eat poison

Woodrats lost their ability to eat toxic creosote bushes after antibiotics killed their gut microbes. Woodrats that never ate the plants were able to do so after receiving fecal transplants with microbes from creosote-eaters, ...

Bees from the inside out

It is 1,825 miles from New Haven, Conn., to Austin, Tex., which typically means 30 hours of driving and three nights in motels, not an easy trip for anyone. But for researchers moving from Yale University to a new lab at ...

White bread helps boost some of the gut's 'good' microbes

White-bread lovers take heart. Scientists are now reporting that this much-maligned food seems to encourage the growth of some of our most helpful inhabitants—beneficial gut bacteria. In addition to this surprising find, ...

Variety in diet can hamper microbial diversity in the gut

Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have discovered that the more diverse the diet of a fish, the less diverse are the microbes living in its gut. If the effect is confirmed in humans, ...

New gut bacterium discovered in termite's digestion of wood

When termites munch on wood, the small bits are delivered to feed a community of unique microbes living in their guts, and in a complex process involving multiple steps, these microbes turn the hard, fibrous material into ...

Rotation-resistant rootworms owe their success to gut microbes

Researchers say they now know what allows some Western corn rootworms to survive crop rotation, a farming practice that once effectively managed the rootworm pests. The answer to the decades-long mystery of rotation-resistant ...

Early infant growth rate linked to composition of gut microbiota

The composition of gut microbiota in a new-born baby's gut has been linked to the rate of early infant growth, reports research published this week in PLOS Computational Biology. The findings support the assertion that the ...

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