Revising a large grant for the last time before submission, and all means are fair

I have 44 students enrolled in this course. Class officially started two minutes ago. They have an exam next week. Thoughts and prayers.

The field is still very driven by correlations, and we need to establish causation much better.

Causation in the diet-microbiota-gut-brain axis also empowers people to mind their health in a whole new way.

Circling back to Hippocrates: "Let food be the medicine"

And thirdly, microbes regulate both gut-barrier and brain-barrier, exposing the brain to a wide variety of metabolites.

But how? A major pathway is the vagus nerve, and severing it in mice extinguishes all signals from Lactobacillus-based emotional regulation.

Another social disorder is social anxiety, which can be induced in mice. If these same mice receive microbiota from social anxiety patients, their behaviour is more pronounced and lasts longer

Additionally, they could find alterations in the gut physiology that correspond to changes in behaviour and are also more prevalent among neurodivergent humans.

What's even more striking, restoring a single bacterial strain of Blautia spp makes GF mice behave as conventional ones!

Since these changes are more pronounced in males, they assessed behaviours that are more often found in human males, such as ASD and social behaviour. And indeed across very many species there was a connection between social behaviour and the microbiome

Interestingly, almost all these processes are more pronounced in males than females (but we don't really know why)

At a very basic level, germ-free animals have hyper-myelination, compared to controls. Too much myelin is not generally seen as a problem, but it is connected to meurodevelopment in e.g. ASD

Gearing up for an exciting talk by @jfcryan.bsky.social!

He started in the brain and ended up in the gut, so opposite trajectory from mine. But as Hippocrates say, everything starts in the gut - or more accurately, in the evolution of the holobiont.

Finally a group picture I can use!

Open science is a many-thronged approach and it may be hard to do all, but we can all do some and aim for more

Data science is socio-technical

Malvika Sharan on FAIR as a DEI imperative

Samuel Kaski demonstrating that AI does indeed have a sense of humour.