Monitoring the rise and fall of the microbiome
Trillions of bacteria live in each person’s digestive tract. Scientists believe that some of these bacteria help digest food and stave off harmful infections, but their role in human health is not well understood. To help shed light on the role of these bacteria, a team of researchers led by MIT associate professor Eric Alm recently tracked fluctuations in the bacterial populations of two research subjects over a full year. The findings, described in the July 25 issue of the journal Genome Biology, suggest that while these populations are fairly stable, they undergo daily fluctuations in response to changes in diet and other factors. “On any given day, the amount of one species could change manyfold, but after a year, that species would still be at the same median level,” says Alm, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Associate Professor of Biological and Environmental Engineering and senior author of the paper. “To...