Gut details
For researchers studying possible connections between health and the trillions of microbes that inhabit our digestive tract, what makes the work so exciting is also what makes it challenging. Despite years of effort, including sequencing the gut microbes of thousands of volunteers, the functions of the vast majority of the proteins found in this microbial community — as many as 85 percent — remain a mystery. Many of these proteins are likely enzymes, the biological catalysts that allow living organisms to perform chemical reactions. Uncharacterized enzymes in the gut microbiome could be carrying out chemical processes that are critical for our health, but further insights have eluded researchers. Help may be on the way. A tool developed by Emily Balskus, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, in collaboration with Curtis Huttenhower, an associate professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has...