#microbiomes

The Secret Magic Of Gophers To Help Restore Devastated Landscapes, study out of University of California, Riverside, published by Frontiers in Microbiology

via Pandas are big 'social media' users

Scientists may have found a crappy💩👀 solution😏 to winding back the clock. A new study reveals that transplanting the feces of younger mice into the gut of older mice can reverse cognitive declines associated with aging.😳💩

The work, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Aging, is the first to suggest a link between gut health and age reversal in rodents.

“It’s almost like ... we could press the rewind button on the aging process,” study author John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, tells Rachel Fritts for Science.

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“The good thing about your microbiome—as opposed to your genome—is that you can change it,” Cryan tells Science.

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To see if the microbiome had an influence on aging, scientists gave the rodents a special poo-fortified meal plan. They started by taking fecal samples from 3- to 4-month-old mice—young adult mice, by human standards—and fed the slurry to geriatric 20-month-old rodents using a feeding tube twice a week.👀🤢 After eight weeks of fecal transplants🤮, the gut microbiome of the older mice started to resemble their younger counterparts. Bacteria, like Enterococcus, which is abundant in young mice, began to flourish in the guts of older mice.

The change in the geriatric rodents wasn’t limited to their guy bacteria. A region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associate with learning and memory, became physically and chemically similar to younger mice. Older rodents that received poop transplants from young mice could navigate mazes faster and remember their layouts better than mice who didn’t get a microbiome upgrade.

“It was really great to see that full change in their microbiomes can really excel such effects on cognitive behavior, like almost resembling the learning performance of young mice, it was pretty mind-blowing,” study author Marcus Böhme, also a University College Cork neuroscientist, tells Inverse’s Elana Spivak.

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“I'm not recommending that we should go into poo transplants👀🤣 ... because we have no evidence that that would work in humans,” Cryan tells Inverse. Still, he says the work suggests an important link between gut health and aging.