This is a continuation of my trying to get caught up on reviewing interesting news. Sometimes a new dimension appears that results in enhancements of the analysis site; other times, it is just interesting events happening. The quality of the items can be questionable (marketing literature), often the reviews reveal some interesting gems.

• Gigantic study of Chinese babies yields slew of health data
  “The Chinese team has so far avoided similar problems. Its rich collection of 1.6 million biological samples includes specimens of stools, blood, placental tissue and umbilical cords. Extensive surveys also record participants’ eating habits, mental health, and other lifestyle factors, such as the amount of mould in their house.”
• “Gut microbiota modulate neurobehavior through changes in brain insulin sensitivity and metabolism”[src]
• ‘Social microbes’ critical to brain development…Absence linked to reduced sociability in people with autism spectrum disorders”[src]
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• Designing large-scale gut microbiome studies – 10 essential considerations<http://blog.dnagenotek.com/microbiome/designing-large-scale-gut-microbiome-studies-10-essential-considerations>
• An analysis of faecal metabolites (chemical molecules in stool produced by microbes) found that less than a fifth (17.9 per cent) of gut processes could be attributed to hereditary factors, but 67.7 per cent of gut activity was found to be influenced by environmental factors, mainly a person’s regular diet. [src]
• Triclosan (TCS) is a high-volume chemical used as an antimicrobial ingredient in more than 2000 consumer products, such as toothpaste, cosmetics, kitchenware, and toys. We report that brief exposure to TCS, at relatively low doses, causes low-grade colonic inflammation, increases colitis, and exacerbates colitis-associated colon cancer in mice. Exposure to TCS alters gut microbiota [src]
  • “Triclosan exposure is practically unavoidable in the United States, but little is known how ingestion may affect our health” [src]

  • Why Is Triclosan in Toothpaste? [Consumer Reports]

• Bacteria Survive in NASA’s Clean Rooms by Eating Cleaning Products [src]
• When three groups of mice received a custom diet supplemented with porphyrin-rich seaweed (a kind of microbiota-accessible carbohydrate (MAC) found in nori) seven days after inoculation with B. ovatus NB001, a robust increase of up to six orders of magnitude was detected in the strain’s density in feces, irrespective of background microbiota.  [src]
• As reported on November 17, 2017 a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in 90 older women showed that supplementation of the probiotic strain Lactobacillus reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 decreased bone loss compared to placebo [src]
• Daily supplementation with the probiotic strain Bacillus subtilis C-3102 may improve stool frequency and consistency in healthy people, says a new study. [src] always note the “may” is not a “will”/ Speculation
• Researchers from Japan are using the findings of studies on centenarians in the country to try and produce new products that will replicate the beneficial aspects of their microbiota. [src]
• Here we report that our routine use of mock communities as internal standards allowed us to discover highly aberrant and strong biases in the relative proportions of multiple taxa in a single Illumina HiSeqPE250 run. [src]
• No clear evidence probiotics can help with human anxiety, study finds
• The University of Otago, Christchurch, researchers found a toxic form of a bacteria called Bacteroides fragilis in the gut of almost 80 percent of people with a pre-cancerous lesion — a precursor to the disease.[src]
• Dr Costello led a faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) study the results of which demonstrate the ability to induce remission in UC, without significant side-effects. [src]