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Who Knew? Gut Bacteria Contribute to Malnutrition
A child suffering from kwashiorkor.Source: CDC/Phil Here’s a surprising result from a new NIH-funded study: a poor diet isn’t the only cause of severe malnutrition. It seems that a ‘bad’ assortment of...
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DNA’s Double Anniversary
April 25 is a very special day. In 2003, Congress declared April 25th DNA Day to mark the date that James Watson and Francis Crick published their seminal one-page paper in Nature [1] describing the...
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Yes, It’s True: There’s Fungus Among Us
Caption: A fluorescent microscope image of a human hair shaft in the skin surrounded by bacteria (purple) and fungi (blue).Credit: Alex Valm, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. Athlete’s...
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Copying and Reading the Book of Life Inside One Cell, Accurately
Caption: The genome researchers collaborated with materials science engineers to create the arrays of microwells or compartments that each capture a single cell.Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of...
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Creative Minds: Can Microbes Influence Mental Health?
Elaine HsiaoCredit: NIH Common Fund While sitting in microbiology class as a college sophomore, Elaine Hsiao was stunned to learn that the human gut held between as much as 6 pounds of bacteria—twice...
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Creative Minds: Broccoli, Microbes, & You
Eat your broccoli! It’s a plea made every night at dinner tables across the country. And it’s a plea worth listening to, because broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables—such as kale, cabbage, and...
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Not Sterile, After All: The Placenta’s Microbiome
Credit: Chad Cohen When thinking about your health, or the health of your children, you’re probably not thinking of the placenta. This often neglected, yet vital, pancake-shaped organ develops during...
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Taking a New Look at Artificial Sweeteners
Diet sodas and other treats sweetened with artificial sweeteners are often viewed as guilt-free pleasures. Because such foods are usually lower in calories than those containing natural sugars, many...
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You Won’t Believe What’s In These Pills
Credit:: Hohmann lab Clostridium difficile, or more commonly “C. diff,” is a nasty bacterium that claims the lives of 14,000 Americans every year. Most at risk are people with conditions requiring...
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Of Microbes, Molecules, and Maps
Bouslimani et al., PNAS These glow-in-the-dark images may look like a 60’s rock album cover, but they’re actually a reflection of some way cool science. Here are maps showing the diversity of bacteria...
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What Is Obesity? Metabolic Signatures Offer New Comprehensive View
Credit: Adapted from Elliott, P et al., Sci Transl Med. 2015 Apr 29;7(285) As obesity has risen in the United States and all around the world, so too have many other obesity-related health conditions:...
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Manipulating Microbes: New Toolbox for Better Health?
Caption: Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (white) living on mammalian cells in the gut (large pink cells coated in microvilli) and being activated by exogenously added compounds (small green dots) to...
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LabTV: Curious About the Microbiome
When people think about the human microbiome—the scientific term for all of the microbes that live in and on our bodies—the focus is often on bacteria. But Keisha Findley, the young researcher featured...
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Creative Minds: Bacteria, Gene Swaps, and Human Cancer
Julie Dunning Hotopp When Julie Dunning Hotopp was a post-doctoral fellow in the early 2000s, bacteria were known for swapping bits of their DNA with other bacteria, a strategy known as lateral gene...
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LabTV: Curious about Computer Modeling of Proteins
In many ways, Josh Carter is a typical college student, with a hectic schedule packed with classes and social activities. But when he enters a structural biology lab at Montana State University in...
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Cool Videos: Another Kind of Art Colony
As long as researchers have been growing bacteria on Petri dishes using a jelly-like growth medium called agar, they have been struck by the interesting colors and growth patterns that microbes can...
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Creative Minds: Making a Miniature Colon in the Lab
Caption: Top down view of gut tissue monolayer grown on an engineered scaffold, which guides the cells into organized crypts structures similar to the conformation of crypts in the human colon. Areas...
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Mouse Study Finds Microbe Might Protect against Food Poisoning
Caption: Scanning electron microscopy image of T. mu in the mouse colon.Credit: Aleksey Chudnovskiy and Miriam Merad, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Recently, we humans have started to pay a...
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Snapshots of Life: Portrait of a Bacterial Biofilm
Credit: Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter, Harvard Medical School, Boston In nature, there is strength in numbers. Sometimes, those numbers also have their own unique beauty. That’s the story behind...
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Eczema Relief: Probiotic Lotion Shows Early Promise
Caption: Scanning electron microscopic image of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (orange).Credit: CDC/Jeff Hageman, MHS Over the years, people suffering from eczema have slathered their skin with lotions...
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Creative Minds: The Human Gut Microbiome’s Top 100 Hits
Michael Fishbach Microbes that live in dirt often engage in their own deadly turf wars, producing a toxic mix of chemical compounds (also called “small molecules”) that can be a source of new...
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Protein Links Gut Microbes, Biological Clocks, and Weight Gain
Caption: Lipids (red) inside mouse intestinal cells with and without NFIL3.Credit: Lora V. Hooper, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas The American epidemic of obesity is a major...
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Expanding Our View of the Human Microbiome
Many people still regard bacteria and other microbes just as disease-causing germs. But it’s a lot more complicated than that. In fact, it’s become increasingly clear that the healthy human body is...
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Senator Udall Visits NIH
It was truly a pleasure speaking with Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico about microbiome research and its potential to improve human health during his visit to NIH. Here, I’m standing with Senator Udall...
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Some ‘Hospital-Acquired’ Infections Traced to Patient’s Own Microbiome
Caption: New computational tool determines whether a gut microbe is the source of a hospital-acquired bloodstream infectionCredit: Fiona Tamburini, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA While being cared...
View ArticleNASA Twins Study Reveals Health Effects of Space Flight
Sending one identical twin into space while the other stays behind on Earth might sound like the plot of a sci-fi thriller. But it’s actually a setup for some truly fascinating scientific research! As...
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Fundamental Knowledge of Microbes Shedding New Light on Human Health
Caption: Human microbiome research requires teamwork. Kimberly Jefferson (second from left), a leader of the Multi-Omic Microbiome Study—Pregnancy Initiative, joins some of the team at Virginia...
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Gut-Dwelling Bacterium Consumes Parkinson’s Drug
Scientists continue to uncover the many fascinating ways in which the trillions of microbes that inhabit the human body influence our health. Now comes yet another surprising discovery: a...
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Targeting the Microbiome to Treat Malnutrition
Caption: A Bangladeshi mother and child in the Nutritional Rehabilitation Unit. Credit: International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh A few years ago, researchers discovered that...
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Americans Are Still Eating Too Much Added Sugar, Fat
Credit: iStock/happy_lark Most of us know one of the best health moves we can make is to skip the junk food and eat a nutritious, well-balanced diet. But how are we doing at putting that knowledge...
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Celebrating 2019 Biomedical Breakthroughs
Happy New Year! As we say goodbye to the Teens, let’s take a look back at 2019 and some of the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that closed out this remarkable decade. Each December, the...
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Could A Gut-Brain Connection Help Explain Autism?
Diego Bohórquez/Credit: Duke University, Durham, NC You might think nutrient-sensing cells in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract would have no connection whatsoever to autism spectrum disorder...
View ArticleCelebrating NIH Science, Blogs, and Blog Readers!
Happy holidays to one and all! As you may have heard, this is my last holiday season as the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—a post that I’ve held for the past 12 years and four...
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Unraveling the Role of the Skin Microbiome in Health and Disease
Caption: Healthy human skin cells (yellow) are home to bacteria (bright pink), fungi (light blue), and other microorganisms. Credit: Alex Valm, University at Albany, NY Human skin is home to diverse...
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More Clues into ME/CFS Discovered in Gut Microbiome
As many as 2.5 million Americans live with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short. It’s a serious disease that can often arise after an infection, leaving people...
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Changes in Human Microbiome Precede Alzheimer’s Cognitive Declines
Caption: The human gut teems with bacteria and other microbes. They contribute to our health but also influence our susceptibility to certain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. Credit: Donny...
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Microbe Normally Found in the Mouth May Drive Progression of Colorectal Cancer
Study findings suggest a subtype of Fusobacterium nucleatum, a microbe normally found in the mouth, may infect colorectal tumors and drive their growth. Credit: Donny Bliss/NIH, Appledesign/Adobe...
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