Category Health/Medical

This is a diagram of human-plant-microbe interactions mediated by plant hormones. Credit: Chanclud and Lacombe

A bowl of salad contains more than vitamins and minerals. Plant matter also includes remnants of the hormones plants produce to control how they grow, age, and manage water intake. Recently, scientists have reported that our GI microbes and cells may respond to these hormones and even produce similar molecules of their own “We know that gut microbiota are involved in human diseases, and that microbes can biosynthesize plant hormones that affect humans, so it makes sense to investigate animal-microbe interactions from the perspective of plants,” says Benoît Lacombe of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

For instance, gut microbes and dietary factors have been ti...

Overview of modeling intestinal tubules in the OrganoPlate platform with 40 microfluidic channel networks and 384-well plate format device.
Bottom right: 3D artist impression of the center of a chip comprising a tubule, an extra cellular matrix gel and a perfusion lane; two phaseguides (white bars) are present that define the three distinct lanes in the central channel. The tubule has a lumen at its apical side that is perfused.

Research conducted at Leiden has established that guts-on-chips respond in the same way to aspirin as real human organs do. This is a sign that these model organs are good predictors of the effect of medical drugs on the human body...

Astronauts could someday benefit from recycling human waste on long space trips using a yeast and  a carbon fixing cyanobacteria or algae
Credit: American Chemical Society

Imagine you’re on your way to Mars, and you lose a crucial tool during a spacewalk. Not to worry, you’ll simply re-enter your spacecraft and use some microorganisms to convert your urine and exhaled CO2 into chemicals to make a new one. That’s one of the ultimate goals of scientists who are developing ways to make long space trips feasible. Astronauts can’t take a lot of spare parts into space because every extra ounce adds to the cost of fuel needed to escape Earth’s gravity...

Serum cortisol fully mediates the relationship between fecal Ruminococcus and MRS-derived brain N-acetylaspartate. First, fecal Ruminococcus negatively predicted MRS-derived brain NAA concentrations (path A). Second, fecal Ruminococcus negatively predicted serum cortisol concentrations (path B). Third, mediation effects were assessed for serum cortisol concentrations. The indirect effect (i.e., the effect of fecal Ruminococcus through serum cortisol on MRS-derived brain NAA; path B × C) was significant, and the direct effect (path A’) was not significant. Thus, serum cortisol fully mediates the relationship between fecal Ruminococcus and MRS-derived brain NAA. Abbreviation: N-acetylaspartate (NAA).

Recent studies show microbes can influence human health, behavior, and certain neurologic...