It's Time to Keep Check on the Microbiome

Technology Networks | October 14, 2019

The human body provides a home to microbes of different varieties, including bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, protists and microscopic animals. The collective sum of these organisms is known as the human microbiome, Over recent years, the human microbiome has garnered increased research attention, and is now dubbed by many scientists as "an organ in its own right", with a plethora of studies outlining its contribution to human health and disease. The microbes inhabiting our bodies can disturb our energy metabolism and immunity, and therefore significantly influence the development of an array of human diseases. However, one element of human microbiome research that has not made headlines is the difficulty that scientists face in analyzing how it changes over time in response to certain stimuli. The most commonly adopted approach to analysis is extracting bacteria from a fecal sample and then sequencing the bacteria's genome. Whilst advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques have bolstered the field of microbiome research, the issue remains in that crucial information is lost about where and when bacterial changes actually occur in the gut. The picture is incomplete. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists have developed a novel approach that they hope will help to overcome these issues and complete the full picture of the human microbiome physiology. Their solution comes in the form of an oscillating gene circuit containing a distinct set of engineered bacterial genes. These genes have been designed to detect and record changes in the growth of different bacterial populations in the guts of living mice with single cell precision.

Spotlight

The discovery of both CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and associated proteins, the Cas nucleases, has revolutionized the field of gene-editing. 

Spotlight

The discovery of both CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and associated proteins, the Cas nucleases, has revolutionized the field of gene-editing. 

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