Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The Robogut: Bring Your Insides Out [video]

This state-of-the-art Robogut at the University of Guelph is used to simulate the inner workings of the human gut with bottles, gas chambers, and tubes. Amazing research. The goal is to mine the liquid gold products of the human microbiome and use them for applications to human health. Who would have thought to turn the complexity of the intestine into an in vitro culturing system. Im inspired by the creativity and applications here. I imagine some of you out there might have some fresh ideas for what you'd like to do with such an apparatus. Leave your comments below.

Apparently, this same lab just used the apparatus to grow a cocktail of good bacteria to treat patients with Clostridium difficile. Link to cbcnews story from today.

                         
Source: thestar.com

2 comments:

  1. Great-- can't wait for this to become more mainstream instead of a last resort for patients. Do think that looking separating people out by blood type would be helpful. Each blood type has a different gut flora.

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    1. Anonymous - thanks!! do you have a reference/citation for blood types having different gut floras. I think you may be referring to gut enterotypes, which are not correlated with blood types and there is some controversy about how 'real' these clustered enterotypes are. For instance, see http://www.nature.com/news/gut-microbial-enterotypes-become-less-clear-cut-1.10276

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