The trillions of microbes and viruses that coexist inside Understanding how the body works — and what happens when things change — is paramount to improving the health and wellbeing of every person on the planet. Our team of expert health writers and editors are here to demystify the latest medical advances, explain how the latest health news affects you, and help you understand which exercise equipment can really help improve your fitness. Whether you're after facts about the human body or the secrets to extreme longevity, our health articles and features aim to leave you better informed, up to date with the latest discoveries, and even more curious about human health. on the surface of the body are collectively known as the microbiome. The largest concentrations of these microbes are found in the gut. Some have been shown to perform helpful roles in the body, such as species of Lactobacillus that can help with digestion, and others, such as toxic strains of Escherichia coli, can cause disease.
Many microbes survive by consuming nutrients that have been produced by other microbes, and when these interactions break down, it can cause an imbalance between helpful and disease-causing microbes that leads to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, until now, it has been difficult to map out all of these complex interactions.
Understanding how the body works — and what happens when things change — is paramount to improving the health and wellbeing of every person on the planet. Our team of expert health writers and editors are here to demystify the latest medical advances, explain how the latest health news affects you, and help you understand which exercise equipment can really help improve your fitness. Whether you're after facts about the human body or the secrets to extreme longevity, our health articles and features aim to leave you better informed, up to date with the latest discoveries, and even more curious about human health. "The authors tackled a novel and challenging aspect of microbiome research, moving beyond simply describing which bacteria are present to developing an analytical framework to quantify cross-feeding interactions," Christopher Stewart, a medical research fellow at Newcastle University in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.
"In doing so, they confirmed some known associations and discovered novel functional associations across many distinct disease conditions," he said.
The researchers developed a computational approach to identify and rank key "feeding" interactions, or the exchange of nutrients, between microbes in the gut. This considered factors such as the diversity and total number of microbes that were predicted to consume or produce specific nutrients.
Then, they tested this approach on a dataset that modeled the metabolism of 955 species of gut microbes that had been collected from more than 1,600 human stool samples and whose genomes could be reconstructed. The participants who provided samples spanned 15 countries and either had one of 11 diseases where the gut microbiome has previously been implicated — such as IBD, type 2 diabetes or colon cancer — or did not have any of these conditions.
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