Broadening microbiota transplants

Reciprocal Gut Microbiota Transplants from Zebrafish and Mice to Germ-free Recipients Reveal Host Habitat Selection

The gut microbiotas of zebrafish and mice share six bacterial divisions, although the specific bacteria within these divisions differ. To test how factors specific to host gut habitat shape microbial community structure, we performed reciprocal transplantations of these microbiotas into germ-free zebrafish and mouse recipients. The results reveal that communities are assembled in predictable wa...

Immune response and gut microbial community structure in bumblebees after microbiota transplants.

Microbial communities are a key component of host health. As the microbiota is initially 'foreign' to a host, the host's immune system should respond to its acquisition. Such variation in the response should relate not only to host genetic background, but also to differences in the beneficial properties of the microbiota. However, little is known about such interactions. Here, we investigate th...

Iterative Broadening

Conventional blind search techniques generally assume that the goal nodes for a given problem are distributed randomly along the fringe of the search tree. We argue that this is often invalid in practice, suggest that a more reasonable assumption is that decisions made at each point in the search carry equal weight, and show that a new search technique that we call iterative broadening leads to...

Cellular transplants.

Faecal transplants.

Recurrent Clostridium difficile infection is a severe and often fatal condition, affecting up to 3000 people in the United Kingdom and 100 000 in the United States, where it kills an estimated 14 000 a year.About a quarter of patients experience a recurrence after an initial mild infection because treatment with antibiotics destroys the diversity of the normal gut microbes and allows C difficil...