On this week’s show: A pill derived from human feces treats recurrent gut infections, and how a squirrel’s microbiome supplies nitrogen during hibernation.
First up this week, Staff Writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss putting the bacterial benefits of human feces in a pill. The hope is to avoid using fecal transplants to treat recurrent gut infections caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile.
Also this week, Hannah Carey, a professor in the department of comparative biosciences within the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, talks with Sarah about how ground squirrels are helped by their gut microbes during hibernation.
Challenging the dogma of gene evolution, and how chiral nanoparticles could give vaccines a boost.
In this episode:
00:45 Genome mutations may be less random than previously thought
A long-standing doctrine in evolution is that mutations can arise anywhere in a genome with equal probability. However, new research is challenging this idea of randomness, showing that mutations in the genome of the plant Arabidosis thaliana appear to happen less frequently in important regions of the genome.
Research article: Munroe et al.
News and Views: Important genomic regions mutate less often than do other regions
13:45 Research Highlights
How hallucinogenic beer helped cement an ancient superpower’s control, and a surprisingly enormous colony of breeding fish.
Research Highlight: Drug-fuelled parties helped ancient Andean rulers to hold power
Research Highlight: Vast fish breeding colony is more than twice the size of Paris
16:11 How a left-handed nanoparticle could give vaccines a boost
The chirality of a molecule – whether it has a left- or right-handed orientation – can have significant impacts on how it works. This week, a team show that left-handed gold nanoparticles can stimulate the immune system of mice, and boost the activity of a flu vaccine.
Research article: Xu et al.
News and Views: Nanoparticle asymmetry shapes an immune response
23:04 Briefing Chat
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, Tasmanian devils’ discerning diets break the rules on scavenging, and new techniques uncovering the sex of ancient human remains may rewrite our assumptions.
Cosmos: Tasmanian devils puzzle science with picky eating habits
The Observer: Archaeology’s sexual revolution
A century after the quantum revolution, a lot of uncertainty remains.
Boomers Daily 