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 Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.j.p.

That's y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P.

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science.

I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

Ebola outbreaks, before the most recent one, have been fairly contained, geographically

limited, and just a couple hundred cases. The latest outbreak, though, which started in late

2013 and lasted more than two years, was entirely different. There were almost 30,000 cases.

Jeremy Lubin, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

You could argue this is the first actual epidemic.

Lubin and his colleagues studied publicly available data on the evolutionary family tree

of the Ebola virus during the latest outbreak, how the strains mutated and changed over

time. And one in particular caught our attention. It arose early in the epidemic, and it's the

only form of the virus that persisted beyond that point. This mutant strain was armed with an

alteration in the protein it uses to enter cells,

and what Lubin's team found was that the modified protein actually made the strain more

infectious to the cells of humans and other primates, but not to other mammals.

The study is in the journal's cell.

Lubin says it's unclear whether this increased infectivity helped drive the outbreak to epidemic proportions,

...