As the head of the National Institute of health I would award funding towards microbes and mental health studies. Getting a better understanding of the impacts microbes has on mental health can greatly benefit our understanding of microbes and mental health as mental health can be very vague and sometimes difficult to understand root causes…

Celiac disease, Diabetes, Asthma, Cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s, obesity, Rheumatoid Arthritis, cystic fibrosis, gastric cancer, alongside many other auto immune diseases. Reflecting back to my initial post, I think I was somewhat on the right path with the ideas that I had but was not for certain, now with more understanding microbes play a much larger impact…

While doing experiments can allow us to find evidence for differences that would have a significant impact, at our current state differences would not be significant as many things are still not fully understood, so while there may be a difference between genes of two different bacteria, once fully understood that difference may not be…

Microbial communities can have significant impact on the brain and mental health states. As we learned in class probiotics had a positive effect on cognitive function which was in part shown by a decrease in stress. Stress might act as a catalyst for dysbiosis especially chronic stress as it creates an increases the likelihood of…

Reading and critiquing someone else’s work typically isn’t the most exciting as the point of peer reviewing is not to bash on someone work but instead give helpful advice to write a stronger paper. However the difficulty comes with trying to find a balance between helpful critiques without sounding like you are attempting to bash…

The process of peer reviewing can be fairly long, from getting through the first rounds of editorial checking to having to re-do experiments with added information that peers recommended adding. Initially editors for a given journal give a paper a pass or not, from there the paper is then passed on to peers who could…

Some ways that we can decrease our exposure to microbes is the amount of antibiotics we take, how frequently we bathe, the over sanitization of our hands when out and about. Another important factor impacting early life exposure to microbes that we can control is how often or if we are out in the environment…

Some of the more interesting things I have learned about is the antibiotic resistance in bacteria not actually being caused by humans, but instead bacteria are receiving a boost in antibiotic resistance by humans. The E. coli strain that was frozen and found to be resistant to an antibiotic that humans had not been using…

Pregnancy can be a terrifying thing, and something that may be undermined by many people is its role in microbial communities. An important factor to maintaining healthy gut microbial communities before and during pregnancy is a healthy diet. Another factor that plays a crucial role in both mother and offspring is the use of antibiotics.…

When asked in class whether or not any of us have never taken any antibiotics, I was unsure what my response to this should have been, as out of my own memory there has not been a time where I was given antibiotics but this may be different from early childhood. I think staying away…