Stat News: "A trip to ‘the poopy lab’ in the interest of drug development"

[Andy]

GUELPH, Ontario — Outside of Emma Allen-Vercoe’s office is a bulletin board pinned with her team’s scientific papers since 2013. It’s the academic’s answer to a military uniform grown heavy with medals.

But all of that research has come with a side effect: an impressive intimacy with the smells of human digestion.

“This is what we formally call the poopy lab,” she said one morning at the end of January. “Every donor that we use has a distinct aroma, because they have a different profile of microbes in the gut, so it’s like a fine wine — just not quite so fine. I guess this is Eau de Ulcerative Colitis … which smells different from Eau de Obesity, and Eau de Healthy Person.”

She’s been working with these gut bacteria for long enough to know what kind of experiment is going on by odor alone. That day, she could pick up notes of short-chain fatty acids; she paused to appreciate a cloud of volatile amines. If this were an obesity experiment, she’d be getting a stronger whiff of butyrate — a bit like rotten cabbage — while a study about premature infants would yield a mild, yogurt-like tang.

What she’s smelling isn’t feces per se. Instead, it’s the mechanical colon that she’s set up in her lab at the University of Guelph, where she is a professor of molecular and cellular biology. She calls it the Robogut. After isolating bacteria from donated human waste, she uses this contraption to see how those microscopic communities shift under different conditions.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/02/16/microbiome-entrepreneur-robogut/

 

[arewenearlythereyet]

Interesting and fairly honest (unlike a lot of gut biome stuff). I liked the following phrases:

“there are a lot of microbes here that we’re using that we know nothing about in terms of their effects.”

“It is actually a microbial conversation,” she said, pointing to the grayish-greenish waste that was giving off Eau de Ulcerative Colitis. “And we haven’t yet found the Rosetta stone.”