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Gut-Brain

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            The papers this week were extremely interesting. I have very little knowledge about how our gut microbiome affects us, so these papers were quite shocking to me. The Buffington paper especially, stood out. It was well organized, well explained, and I am completely in agreement with the conclusions. Developing a non-invasive treatment for patients through probiotics would be amazing. More research obviously needs to be done, but I think this paper does a good job at establishing how one species of bacteria can affect the whole organism. I liked how the researchers brought in ASD because it was very clear what the clinical significance of this paper is. Since an increasingly amount of people in the United States are becoming obese, this topic is currently very relevant as well. Since rodents and people are different, I’d be very curious to see what the comparison of the gut microbiome is between humans with high fat diets compared to low fat diets. Unlike a lot of animal models, taking stool samples can easily be done in humans.
            The Reber paper was a little less convincing for me. I was confused about their conclusion about anxiolytic effects, because from figure 1D the only significant difference was between the CSC and SHC groups, both of which received the immunization. There were no differences amongst the immunized and non-immunized groups. There was also no difference in the vehicle mice. The other issue that I had was in the microglia density test, they only looked at the CSC-exposed mice. I wish they looked at the SHC mice to see the effects of this immunization on non-stressed mice. Overall, though, I think this whole field of study has so much significance. We always talk about how many more factors affect humans over mice, but we can study the differences in human gut microbiomes with healthy individuals compared to non-healthy individuals and then work towards developing treatments. Again, I don’t know anything about this field, but just reading these papers, it seems very promising.

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