Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years. Yacold also

partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for

gut health, an investigator-led research program. To learn more about Yachtold, visit yawcult.co.

That's Y-A-K-U-L-T-C-O-J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute? In recent years,

scientists have shown that the microbes that live in our guts play crucial roles in our lives.

They're involved in digestion, obesity, even mood. And a few can cause serious illness. So it would

be a good idea to know the identities of the bacteria inside us, and yet that info has been incomplete.

But now researchers have developed a technique to get a better census of the gut microbiome.

And using the new system, the researchers have found that our microorganisms are even more diverse than we knew.

The report is in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Currently, researchers analyze microbial diversity by taking a sample they hope includes the

different kinds of bacteria in the gut.

They then try to identify the different species by looking at their genomes, but they can

only do that second hand by trying to piece together many short snippets of DNA, which can

be confusing and inadequate when dealing with numerous different

kinds of bacteria. So geneticists at Stanford University got together with computer scientists to

come up with a new approach. They used sophisticated computational techniques that enabled them to

analyze much longer stretches of DNA, which included many genes that would be missed with the older

system. For example,

when they tested the gut microbiome from a healthy human male the old way, they found

...