New Paper: Stool Microbiota and Vaccine Responses of Infants

As part of getting my blogging groove back on, I thought I would talk about my part in this new paper. Together, Nazmul (the first author) and I analyzed the gut microbiota of a large cohort of infants in Bangladesh, paying extra attention to the bifidobacteria. Nazmul (and others) did a ton of work looking at the response to various vaccines in these infants. We found that the response to some vaccines was better in infants that had higher levels of bifidobacteria.

A couple of things of note about my contribution to this paper:

1) The correlations between vaccine response and the microbiota sometimes differed between species and subspecies of bifidobacteria, which means that A) not all bifidobacteria are equal, and B) that the effects can be correlated to a manageable set of genes. We were able to trace the effects down to subspecies level within the B. longum group thanks to a new method that I helped develop, which should be getting it's own paper soon.

2) The levels of bifidobacteria in these infants were really high compared to some other cohorts I have seen or studied myself. This was despite the high rate of c-section birth noted in the paper. I find this super interesting.

3) Parents, please vaccinate your kids so that stuff like this and this doesn't happen. Herd immunity is a real thing. When you choose not to vaccinate your child, you put other kids who can't get vaccinated for whatever reason (immunocompromised, etc.) or for whom vaccines don't work at risk. No matter what type of bacteria live in your child's gut, vaccination is almost assuredly better than no vaccination.

Anyway, I was glad to use my Bif-TRFLP technique on a new set of infants and be involved in this cool study. Grad school has given me the chance to collaborate on projects with a lot of great people on interesting things. I'm glad Charles Stephensen got interested in gut microbes and started this collaboration with my advisor. I'm increasingly convinced that collaborations are the best way to do impactful research. It's so hard to be an expert in all the relevent aspects of today's unsolved problems.