As the head of a funding agency, I would be most excited about funding a research project that is related with a specific disease. For example, I personally is very interested in type 2 diabetes. From what we have learned in this course, we already known that type 2 diabetes is related with our gut microbiomes. All findings are based on the animal studies. I am thinking about applying those findings into real lives. Type 2 diabetes has become a big health concern all over the world. We still not having a efficient way to help patients to get rid of taking insulin injections and go back to normal health states. If remodeling our gut microbiome environment is a new way, I think it worth a try.
Writing Exercise #14
human non-infectious diseases that you can think of that are influenced by microorganisms:
- Alzheimer’s
- depression
- cancer
- heart disease
Compared with my answer in writing exercise #1, I am more confident about my answer now. I think the main content that I will take away from this course is the fact that microorganisms have an influence on our health in a very complex way. We all need to know how to maintain our health by maintaining a balance of all human microbiome. I may not need write a lot in my future career, but I found a lot of interesting topics from this course. All those topic worth further studies to discover. I will keep researching these topic in the future since they will be helpful for my career.
Writing Exercise #13
- Can experiments detect differences that matter?
It is important because we need to be able to identify functional differences in closely related genes from sequence alone. It also helps readers to identify what matters in an article.
- Does the study show causation or correlation?
Correlation is not causation, but correlation almost always implies some sort of causal relationship. If it is a causation, which mean it has directly affect the on the experimental subjects; if it is a correaltion, there might be a link between the source and the result in the pathway of the effection.
- What is the mechanism?
It is important to understand the mechanism because when we find any question in the new finding, we will need to go through the mechanism and check on the each step.
- How much do experiments reflect reality?
It is important in applying the new findings into the real life, and help readers to understand the importance of the findings.
- Could anything else explain the results?
If there are some other factors contribute to the problem, then we will think about causation and correlation again. If there is another possibility, we will need to find out the relationships between these factors.
Writing Exercise #12
Our gut microbime could have a strong effect to our brain with their neurotransmitter production and metabolism. According to the reading for this week, those neurotransmitter hormones could trigger the change in our brain gene expression and resulting in mental health disease.
The communication of brain and gut microbes are bidirectional. Multiple studies show that brain could alter the release of hormones, which could affect the activities of microbes and what they release. Mental health could influence gut microbiota based off of factors like stress. a person under chronic stress undergoes chemical changes in the body like an increase in the hormone called cortisol. It could potentially alter gut microbiota populations since it’s long term impacts on the body include things like increased or decreased appetite, raised blood pressure, lowered immune response, and over or under sleeping.