Predicting A Human Gut Microbiota
Common sense dictates that there should be a relationship between diet and the composition of gut microbiota. But, is this relationship strong enough so that we can predict changes in the microbiota given a certain diet?
With a series of experiments using gnotobiotic mice, scientists have demonstrated that it is possible to predict changes in the human gut microbiota. They reproduced a model human gut community of ten sequenced human gut bacteria in mice and followed changes in community composition in response to changes in host diet.
Using several diets with different concentrations of four ingredients, casein, corn oil, cornstarch, and sucrose, it is possible to feed a linear model to predict the abundance of each species as a function of diet. This model is able to predict 61% of population variation.
Total community abundance (biomass) and the abundance of each community member can best be explained by changes in casein consumption. Seven of these species are positively correlated with the concentration of casein and the other three species are negatively correlated with casein concentration.
The scientists also studied some diets consisting of random combinations of human pureed baby food and administered these diets to the mice. In this way, the diets were closer to real human diets. Again, the linear model could predict the 60% of the variation in species abundance knowing the concentrations of the components of the diets.
Read more about this topic: Gut Flora
Famous quotes containing the words predicting, human and/or gut:
“To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Every thing teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)