Haydeh Payami helped uncover the genetic basis of Parkinson’s disease. Now, she hopes to find new ways to treat the disease by studying the gut microbiome.

Quieting immune attacks against pathogens and even providing nutrients to the invaders could improve health, according to a new line of research.

Bacteria in the gut influence the production of antibodies and themselves secrete metabolites. In a pregnant woman, these compounds may influence immune development of her fetus.

Moving from Prediction to Prevention By Noel R. Rose Preventing autoimmune diseases is still a long way off, but it's a goal worth pursuing. © Bill McAllen Photography For me, the dream began in the early 1960s. As a medical student, I was helping with the care of a 16-year-old girl who had classical Hashimoto thyroiditis, a disease that more commonly occurs among middle-aged women. I guessed that this

1 Nonetheless, treatment probably won't involve blocking any one pathway entirely. Instead, the best treatments will make slight modifications in several places. "The future is really novel pathways - to interact with novel pathways that offer the opportunity for different types of responses," says Brian Kotzin, vice president of medical sciences at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Billions of Data Points Despite the potential undesirable con

Bacteria that live in the digestive tracts of animals may influence the adaptive trajectories of their hosts.

Ned Shaw US scientists have reason to feel both heady and scared. The federal government recently released unprecedented billions of dollars to fund bioterrorism research. Yet, the merits of this sudden shift in focus are being debated, and some worry that the money will be squandered or wasted. "I have been really very upset by the focus on bioterrorism," says Stanley Falkow, professor of microbiology and immunology and of medicine at Stanford University. "Everybody's talking about it, but th

D.F. Dowd Nearly one hundred years ago, two German scientists introduced the concept of autoimmune disease;1 it didn't catch on. Indeed, even the investigators themselves were skeptical. To most immunologists, the notion that people might develop immune reactions to their own bodies seemed counterintuitive, even preposterous. "People were very, very reluctant to accept the idea," says Noel Rose, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Autoimmune Disease Research and a long-time ex

Gut bacteria may be the missing piece that explains the connection between diet and cancer risk.

Research on the human microbiome is booming, and scientists have moved from simply taking stock of gut flora to understanding the influence of microbes throughout the body.