FT

I love that microbiome research seems to be ramping up

www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/09/09/216553408/microbe-transplants-treat-some-diseases-that-drugs-cant-fix

I heard that too. I think the reporter got confused. They are considering "microbiome manipulation" for conditions such as obesity. Hopefully they will develop methods involving oral probiotics, or nutritional manipulation, or manipulations other than FT. To work on obesity, I think the manipulation will need to involve small intestine, and FT does not go there.

Mostly it was a story about c-diff. Works great for c-diff. Re-balances gut microbes and environment for c-diff is no longer favorable. When the immune system is exerting ongoing forces to mess up gut microbe balance (as seems to be the case with UC) it hardly works for more than a short while. They are going to have to fix the underlying problem, and only then this may be a quick way to re-balance gut microbes.

I tracked down the obesity study because I was pretty sure it was not actually FT research. I had heard it was probiotic research. Turns out they did two experiments, one with unaltered fecal matter, and then one where they cultured the "good germs" found in fecal matter and gave the cultured material to the mice.

The good news is that both ways worked equally well. This is really good news since the method of transferring the germs was oral.

That's right, poop shake! ... If I could choose between swallowing some crap or swallowing some bacteria grown from crap, I would take the latter. IMO, anyone choosing the crap over controlled cultures should have to visit a psychologist.

in the 1st experiment they said...
Fecal samples were collected from each twin, frozen immediately after they were produced, and stored at –80°C. Each fecal sample was introduced, via a single oral gavage, into a group of 8- to 9-week-old adult male germ-free C57BL/6J mice

in the 2nd experiment they said...
We followed up these studies of transplanted, intact, and uncultured donor communities with a set of experiments involving culture collections produced from the fecal microbiota .... Collections of cultured anaerobic bacteria were generated from each co-twin in DZ pair and subsequently introduced into separate groups of 8-week-old germ-free male C57BL/6J mice

and the results said...
As in the case of uncultured communities, we observed a significantly greater increase in adiposity in recipients of the obese twin’s culture collection compared with the lean co-twin’s culture collection .... the metabolic profiles generated by the transplanted culture collections clustered with the profiles produced by the corresponding intact uncultured communities

It is like the press is just discovering FT, and they are titillated by the idea. These reporters fail to realize that serious researchers are not interested in FT per se, they are interested in the gut microbes, and will take what they learn and develop probiotic therapies. Aside from the bacteria strains, there is no reason to use fecal matter once the right probiotic therapies get developed.

www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6150/1241214.full