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Scientists have isolated a molecule that may be under-produced in the gut, a discovery that may lead to treatments for the neurodegenerative condition.

#weizmann institute of science #science #health #ALS #gut bacteria #microbes #gut microbes #gut flora #flora #bacteria #intestinal bacteria #intestinal flora #intestinal health #nicotinamide #disease

The Bacteria In Your Gut May Reveal Your True Age

by Emily Mullin / Science Magazine

The billions of bacteria that call your gut home may help regulate everything from your ability to digest food to how your immune system functions. But scientists know very little of how that system, known as the microbiome, changes over time, or even what a “normal” one looks like.

Now, researchers studying the gut bacteria of thousands of people around the globe have come to one conclusion: The microbiome is a surprisingly accurate biological clock, able to predict the age of most people within years.

View More Micrographs of Gut Bacteria

To discover how the microbiome changes over time, longevity researcher Alex Zhavoronkov and colleagues at InSilico Medicine, a Rockville, Maryland–based artificial intelligence startup, examined more than 3600 samples of gut bacteria from 1165 healthy individuals living across the globe.

Of the samples, about a third were from people aged 20 to 39, another third were from people aged 40 to 59, and the final third were from people aged 60 to 90.

The scientists then used machine learning to analyze the data. First, they trained their computer program, a deep learning algorithm loosely modeled on how neurons work in the brain, on 95 different species of bacteria from 90% of the samples, along with the ages of the people they had come from.

Read the entire article

Image above © Dennis Kunkel / Science Source

#gut bacteria #intestinal flora #microbes #digestion #Science #medical stock photos #science images #Science Source

Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.

http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

From the article:

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

Humans can’t digest soluble fiber, so we enlist microbes to dismantle it for us, sopping up their metabolites. The Burkina Faso microbiota produced about twice as much of these fermentation by-products, called short-chain fatty acids, as the Florentine. That gave a strong indication that fiber, the raw material solely fermented by microbes, was somehow boosting microbial diversity in the Africans.

#the wages of fast food #intestinal flora #human microbiota #fiber #complex carbohydrates #ancestral diet and evolution #ancestral microbiome

I just spent the last hour running around in the dark looking for spiders because I'm continuing my intestinal flora research. Go science.

On another note I got my surface replaced. All I need to do is reinstall Clip Studio and I'm back in business. I can draw Josuke and Okuyasu in peace again.

#this post has been brought to you by the letter E #my text #spiders #research #intestinal flora #surface #update #my spider catching device is a plastic cup and a paper plate #both of which are taped to two long sticks #clip studio #I caught 8 #two of which are REEEAAL nasty and big #we've wanted a black widow for the cool factor #so I was looking for one too #until I realized I'm trying to incur the wrath of a very venomous spider #at night #in the dark

The composition of the gut microbiome can be altered by an impaired immune system which results in metabolic disease and leads to obesity.

Several species of beneficial gut bacteria that protect people against food allergies have been identified and could soon become available as a treatment.