Jon : Welcome to Episode 168 of The Digital Life, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett.

This week on the podcast is the second in our special series of episodes put together in conjunction with our friends at the GET Conference, on the cutting edge of research science and technology.

In this week’s episode we’re exploring the topic of the microbiome, with interviews with Embriette Hyde and Justine Dubilias of American Gut Project and Brian Klein of the Forsyth Institute.

We’re only just beginning to understand the microorganisms that resides in, on, and around us.

In the past it was estimated that we have 10x more non-human cells than human cells. More recent estimates lower that number to equal amounts of cells for both human and microorganisms.

And, while we have a mutually beneficial relationship with some of the microbiota that colonize us, for some we just don’t understand what the relationship is, yet.

Let’s start with our interview with Embriette Hyde and Justine Dubilias of American Gut Project.

Embriette: I am Dr. Embriette Hyde. I am the Project Manager of American Gut Project at UCSD, University of California, San Diego.

Justine: I am Dr. Justine Dubilias. I am the Analyst on the American Gut Project at UCSD.

Dirk: Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about the American Gut Project and the work you are doing with it.

Embriette: It is a citizen science microbiome project, basically. Human microbiome research took off with the human microbiome, which was the first MIH funded effort to figure out what a healthy human microbiome looks like. We really realized after that study that it is really hard to define healthy because everybody is so variable. That pushed off researchers the world over and labs all over the world are looking at is the microbiome associated with this disease or with that disease or with this factor or with that factor. One of the things that we need to keep in mind is that to really accurately figure out where the associations are and get some statistical power in there, we need to get a good sampling of the population. We cannot just focus on, for example, a population in a single geographical location, which happens sometimes with research projects because the funding is limited, so you cannot sample a million people because you just don't have the money to do that. That is what we are trying to do with American Gut, is reach out to the citizens [inaudible 00:01:27] as crowd sourced effort, where the participants themselves are not only providing samples to us but also the funding to do the work. Then we can get the sample sizes that we need for statistical power and to make some meaningful connections.

Dirk: That is great. For some of our listeners, even though microbiome is a hot term these days in the science community, maybe not all of our listeners know what the micribiome is. Could you explain it in a very basic way, what does that mean?

Justine: You are covered in bacteria.

Dirk: That is scary.

Embriette: It shouldn't be.

Justine: They are actually your friends. Your body has about seventeen proteins that can break down carbohydrates, just in your human genome. Your microbiome, these bacteria that live in your stomach, can breakdown about seventeen or have about seventeen thousand ways to break down sugar. They are helping you digest your food. They are giving you vitamins. They are potentially protecting you against harmful bacteria that are coming in. They can help regulate whether you are obese or lean. They can contribute to auto immune disease. There is a whole variety of pathways they are involved in.

Embriette: I like what she said about helping fight against disease because some studies using germ free animal models, so these are animals that are basically sterile,, they have no bacteria in them what so ever. You can see that their immune system is basically non existent.