Common food additive causes adverse health effects in mice

A common food additive, recently banned in France but allowed in the U.S. and many other countries, was found to significantly alter gut microbiota in mice, causing inflammation in the colon and changes in protein expression ...

Exploring the role of gut bacteria in digestion

They congregate in the environments that suit them best; some prefer the dry, desert-like conditions of our forearms while others thrive in the Amazon-style humidity of our feet.

Neanderthal gut microbiota and the bacteria helping our health

Neanderthals' gut microbiota included beneficial microorganisms that are also found in the modern human microbiome. An international research group led by the University of Bologna achieved this result by extracting and analyzing ...

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 ...

Why mosquitoes bite some people more than others

Surprisingly few of the more than 3,000 mosquito species actually specialise in biting humans. Instead, most are opportunistic feeders – feeding when they are able and from lots of different sources. But Aedes aegypti and ...

How honey bee gut bacteria help to digest their pollen-rich diet

The honey bee gut is colonized by specialized bacteria that help digest components of the floral pollen diet and produce molecules that likely promote bee health. In a study publishing 12 December in the open access journal ...

Almost 2,000 unknown bacteria discovered in the human gut

Researchers at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute have identified almost 2000 bacterial species living in the human gut. These species are yet to be cultured in the lab. The team used ...

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