What’s bugging you?WINTER is coming, in the northern hemisphere at least. Time, then, to break out the heavy coats, thick gloves and galoshes—but also time, if a study by Mirko Trajkovski of the University of Geneva is correct, for your gut bacteria to remodel your intestines and make them better at absorbing nutrients before the blizzards arrive. Dr Trajkovski’s work, just published in Cell, was on mice. But previous experience suggests that in this area of biology what applies to mice applies to men as well. If that is true in this case too, it will mean an important part of the human body’s thermoregulation is actually controlled by its companion microbes.
Dr Trajkovski’s research group studies obesity and insulin resistance—the latter being the cause of the form of diabetes many people suffer from in later life. Past studies have shown that obese animals (people included) have different microbial mixtures, known as microbiomes, in their guts from those found in animals of normal weight. Moreover, in mice at least, modifying the mix can induce obesity without a change of diet. One line of...Continue reading
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