Excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine by @michaelpollan "Some of my best friends are germs" #ASM2013

Quick post here.  There is a really nice piece on in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Michael Pollan on the human microbiome: Say Hello to the 100 Trillion Bacteria That Make Up Your Microbiome.  In it he discusses how he had his microbiome typed by the American Gut Project  and he discusses browsing through the output.  He also discusses a diversity of issues in the microbiome and work of various folks.  People featured include Justin Sonnenburg, Rob Knight, Burce German, Catherine Lozupone, Stanley Falkow, Jeffrey Gordon, Michael Fischback, Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, Martin Blaser, Ruth Ley, Andrew Gewirtz, Patrice Cani, Erica Sonnenburg, and Stephen O’Keefe.  The article does a really good job of highlighting why the microbiome is important yet does not oversell what we know at this point.

I note – Pollan came to UC Davis as part of his research for the article a little while back.  Below are some pics of him getting a tour of the UC Davis LEED Platinum brewing facility.  Anyway the article is definitely worth a look.  And just in time for the ASM 2013 Meeting which I am about to head to this AM.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen