WITHOUT the “good” bacteria in our guts, we could not digest food. You might expect that we would all have the same set of bacteria to provide the chemical machinery that does the job. But this turns out to be only half true.
Knowing that gut bacteria are key to digestion and metabolism, Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues went in search of a core group of bacterial species that aid digestion. They expected to find these species living in the guts of most healthy people.
When the researchers analysed faeces…
