The gut microbiomes of city-dwelling animals, including coyotes, lizards, and birds, show similarities to those found in humans who also live in urban environments.
A bacterium that produces an insulin-like peptide can give mice type 1 diabetes, and infection with the microbe seems to predict the onset of the disease in humans, a study finds.
Milk fortifiers of human origin show no evident advantage in the development of the gut microbiota of premature infants over fortifiers derived from cows, while the intake of the mother’s own milk does, two studies suggest.
Mixtures of viruses that attack inflammatory bowel disease–causing bacteria in mice also survive the digestive tract and are well-tolerated in humans, a study finds.
Researchers are going beyond fecal samples to understand how the patterns of commensal microbes in the gastrointestinal tract influence development and health.
Flavivirus infections alter the skin microbiome of mice to increase the production of a sweet-smelling compound that attracts the viruses’ insect vectors, a study finds.
The Scientist spoke with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School researchers Scott Weiss and Yang-Yu Liu, who propose that people bank stool samples when they’re young and healthy so that they can be transplanted to rejuvenate the gut microbiome later on.
Studies are finding that a single course of antibiotics alters the gut microbiomes of healthy volunteers—and that it can take months or even years to recover the original species composition.
New techniques have shown that people reached the New World far earlier than the long-standing estimate of 13,000 years ago, but scientists still debate exactly when humans arrived on the continent—and how.
Diverse lines of evidence point to humans’ presence in the New World long before the dawn of Clovis culture. But rewriting this chapter of human history raises many questions about how these early people came to inhabit these continents.
