Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories we've read in the Nature briefing, Nature's daily roundup email of the latest science stories. And talking with me today is none other than Nick Petrich Howe. Nick, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well, Ben. How's it going for you? It's going good. I've got a fun story to talk about today. And why do I go first? And it's one that I read about in nature based on a nature paper. And it's about how socialising helps babies to develop a more diverse set of gut microbes.

Okay. So when you say baby socialising, is this just like, you know, rubbing their heads

together, licking each other, that sort of stuff?

Because I could imagine that might contribute to a different microbiome.

You are bang on.

So this is a story about how a large proportion, it turns out, of a baby's developing microbiota comes from their peers, or their friends, I suppose, at nursery.

Now, we call it nursery here in the UK.

Perhaps listening, you might know it as daycare.

Either way, I mean, a place where young children get looked after during the day, they interact, they play, they have a great time.

And it turns out that this setting seems to play a

big role in how the population of microbes in a kid's gut develops. Now we know that a baby's

microbiome develops quickly after they're born, mainly through microbial transfer from their mother.

And research has shown that people who live together start to share microbial

strains but how this developing population changes in the very first few years of life hasn't been

well studied and that's where this work comes in so they're just trying to understand what's happening

you know outside the family home but still in these early years of Absolutely right. So researchers examine the microbiomes of 43 babies with a median age of 10 months at the start of the study.

So very small children. And the research followed them before, during and after, they attended their first year of nursery in Italy.

Now, some of the babies were enrolled in their very first day of nursery, which would have been a lot of fun to be involved with, I'm sure.

Less fun, I think it's fair to say, would be those folk who had to then collect and analyze the fecal samples from these babies, as well as 10 nursery staff and folk who lived in the same homes as the children. So we've

got 39 mothers, 30 fathers, seven siblings, three dogs and two cats. And a lot of fecal samples.

Quite. And they did show a lot of changes in these babies gut microbiomes. I can bet. So what sort of

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