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Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by maerF0x0 on Saturday October 11, 2014 @08:23PM (#8443858)
>" than man will ever fully know about"

The more this works, the more we'll be inclined to study it. We'll know eventually.

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by jaggederest on Saturday October 11, 2014 @09:40PM (#8444007)
Bacteria evolve faster than we can isolate and sequence them.

Even brewer's yeast is discarded after a few generations, usually, since it mutates enough to change the flavor of the resulting beer, and that's in an extremely well controlled environment.

Imagine that happening every six weeks in your gastrointestinal tract. Multiply by 6 billion people. I'd guess it's extremely unlikely we're going to thoroughly investigate all of those different variations on the theme.

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by giblaz on Saturday October 11, 2014 @10:38PM (#8444116)
Take a large sample of people and find out patterns in their gastrointestinal bacteria, and run the numbers.

Is it out of the question for people to be consistently pooping & supplying this data so we have ongoing tracking of the ratios of the various bacteria present in the population? Some clear patterns may arise.

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by dlss on Saturday October 11, 2014 @11:18PM (#8444214)
Clear patterns did arise when the Human Microbiome project did this :)

http://academy.asm.org/images/stories/documents/FAQ_Human_Mi...

That represents the consensus view (ie no exotic theories). The really good stuff starts on page 10.

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by ssully on Sunday October 12, 2014 @01:33AM (#8444502)
This is actually really interesting, thanks for sharing.

They talk about mother's milk/breast milk being a source of microbes for babies at birth. I have heard this before and I wonder if it could be an alternative to this pill/fecal transplants?

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by dlss on Sunday October 12, 2014 @08:07PM (#8446999)
It depends what you're using the feces to accomplish. Usually FMT is done for people suffering from CDiff infections. The healthy gut flora outcompete the CDiff, causing the infection to go away.

Mother's milk is mostly viruses, so it's unlikely this would work against CDiff. For other users is sounds interesting though!

Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by maerF0x0 on Sunday October 12, 2014 @02:24PM (#8446101)
TIL ^^ .. Awesome.
Re:A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow by eru on Saturday October 11, 2014 @09:20PM (#8443978)
Depends. Species might come and go, depending on how dynamic the evolutionary environment is there.