The Microbiome is Hip and Trendy

One topic I’ll probably comment on fairly often is the vast ecosystem of microbes that coexist with us, mainly inside our digestive tract. Why?

(1) The Microbiome is Hip and Trendy. Hardly a day goes by without hearing something new and exciting about it. To pick an example from just a few days ago: gut microbes’ transformation of a compound found in red meat may be a key mechanism underlying red meat’s link with heart disease; stories in the Economist and the New York Times refer to this paper (which I haven’t read). If you want quantitative proof of the trendiness of the microbiome:

and

(2) My lab explores this area using new sorts of imaging. Here’s a movie of bacteria swimming in the intestine of a live larval zebrafish, something that’s going on in your guts, as well!