About Kristina Campbell

Science writer Kristina Campbell (M.Sc.), from British Columbia (Canada), specializes in communicating about the gut microbiota, digestive health, and nutrition. Author of the best selling Well-Fed Microbiome Cookbook, her freelance work has appeared in publications around the world. Kristina joined the Gut Microbiota for Health publishing team in 2014.  Find her on: GoogleTwitter

A new study by a group of scientists from Danone Nutricia Research (the Netherlands), the Laboratory of Microbiology at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), and the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London (United Kingdom) explored how the gut microbiota tracks eczema development in early life—and also whether gut microbiota composition was modulated by a prebiotic early-life dietary intervention.

When UK researcher Glenn R. Gibson introduced the concept of prebiotics to the scientific community in 1995 it was clear to him that the gut microbiota had the potential to play a major role in health.

New work, led by Pamela Silver of The Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard (USA), appears to have overcome this problem. The research, which has been called "incredibly exciting" by other scientists, involved the design of a bacterial trigger circuit that detects and responds to tetrathionate—a transient product of reactive oxygen species.

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