Bacterial strain diversity in the gut

What drives bacterial strain diversity in the gut? Although there are a number of possible explanations, a recent opinion piece published in TRENDs in Microbiology by Dr Pauline Scanlan, a Royal Society – Science Foundation ...

Microbiome diversity is influenced by chance encounters

Within the human digestive tract, there are trillions of bacteria, and these communities contain hundreds or even thousands of species. The makeup of those populations can vary greatly from one person to another, depending ...

Digital microbes for munching yourself healthy

Hundreds of bacterial species live in the human gut, helping to digest food. The metabolic processes of these bacteria are not only tremendously important to human health – they are also tremendously complex. A research ...

Unraveling the food web in your gut

Despite recent progress, the organization and ecological properties of the intestinal microbial ecosystem remain under investigated. Using a manually curated metabolic module framework for (meta-)genomic data analysis, Sara ...

How viruses infect bacteria: A tale of a tail

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Using state-of-the-art tools, EPFL scientists have described a million-atom "tail" that bacteriophages use to breach bacterial surfaces. The breakthrough has major implications ...

Our gut microbiome is always changing; it's also remarkably stable

Turnover is to be expected in the gut—as soon as one bacterium leaves, another is ready to divide and take its place. The question, explored in a Review published March 17 in Trends in Microbiology, part of a special issue ...

Bacterial brawls mark life in the gut's microbiome

Bacterially speaking, it gets very crowded in the human gut, with trillions of cells jostling for a position to carry out a host of specialized and often crucial tasks. A new Yale study, published the week of March 7 in the ...

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