Gibbons Lab
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The gut microbiome is an integral component of the body, but its importance in the human aging process is unclear. ISB researchers and their collaborators have identified distinct signatures in the gut microbiome that are associated with either healthy or unhealthy aging trajectories, which in turn predict survival in a population of older individuals.
The inaugural ISB Virtual Microbiome Series highlighted recent in silico, in vitro, and in vivo advances toward engineering the gut microbiome to resolve complex diseases.
ISB researchers examined the associations between the gut microbiomes of about 3,400 people and roughly 150 host characteristics. The team looked at diet, medication use, clinical blood markers, and other lifestyle and clinical factors, and found evidence that variations of the gut microbiome are associated with health and disease.
Everybody pees and poops. What if there was a way to use the byproducts of our everyday bodily functions to understand the general health of a population? That is exactly what MIT’s Dr. Eric Alm is pursuing. In an ISB-Town Hall Seattle live stream, Alm discussed the promise of this novel form of public health tracking.
There is a dichotomy between Bacteroides- and Prevotella-dominated guts — two common gut bacterial genera — and there is a significant barrier when it comes to transitioning from one to the other.
A promising new open-source metabolic modeling tool provides microbiome researchers a path forward in predicting ecosystem function from community structure. News of the software package, called MICOM, was developed in part by researchers in ISB’s Gibbons Lab, and its uses were published in the journal mSystems.