Overselling the microbiome award of the week: Science News on "Bacteria that Trigger Crohn’s"

Well, this is just a terrible, terrible, very misleading headline: Bacteria that trigger Crohn’s disease identified | Science News.  The headline relates to a story by Ashley Yeager on a new paper in Cell Host and Microbe.  The paper is “The Treatment-Naive Microbiome in New-Onset Crohn’s Disease” and it seems very interesting on first glance and very very very careful in the wording about what they have shown in the paper.  And all that care is wasted with news headlines like this.  The paper does not identify any bacteria that “trigger” Crohn’s.  They do identify microbial signatures with various aspects of Crohn’s and find some very interesting things.  But no triggering is shown.  Nor claimed.  And then Science News misleads people into thinking this article will be about what triggers Crohn’s.  Lame.  Annoying.  And a winner of the Overselling the Microbiome Award of the week.

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