Horse nutrition: Prebiotics do more harm than good

Prebiotics are only able to help stabilise the intestinal flora of horses to a limited degree. Before they can reach the intestines, commercially available supplements partially break down in the animals' stomachs, which ...

More inflexible than imagined

Oligosaccharides – chains of sugar building blocks – are essential for biological cells. Scientists had thought that these molecules were freely mobile, but an international research team has now shown that such sugar ...

Mothers' milk and the infant gut microbiota: An ancient symbiosis

Nursing infants' gastrointestinal tracts are enriched with specific protective microbes. Mother's milk, itself, guides the development of neonates' gut microbiota, nourishing a very specific bacterial population that, in ...

How lipids are flipped

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Bern has succeeded in determining the structure of a lipid flippase at high resolution, which has provided insight into how this membrane protein transports lipids ...