This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in Tagata. Got a minute?

These days antibiotics are no silver bullet.

In fact, if you get them in the hospital, you may end up with an additional infection, like the

bug Clostridium difficile, or C-DIF, which infects more than 300,000 Americans a year and

kills some 14,000.

C-diff flourishes in the post- antibiotic

microbe-free landscape of your gut.

But there is a way to stop it, a fecal transplant. That cocktail of microbes from a healthy person's

gut can rein in a C. DIF outbreak. The question is not ew, it's what are the

transplant's active ingredients?

Well, one of them appears to be a bacterium syndons.

Because in past studies, people and mice that harbored sea cendons

were protected against a full-blown sea diff infection.

So researchers dosed mice with the good guy, sea cendens, after a bout of antibiotics.

And the treatment did indeed ward off sea diff, compared to a cocktail of other microbes or nothing at all.

C. Sundance makes a living by breaking down bile, the researchers say, and it's those secondary products that seem to inhibit C. D. the targeted probiotic treatments. But study author Eric Pamer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

says it's worth remembering that when it comes to microbes, the sum is often greater than its

parts. In some ways, I would say this is far more complex than an orchestra in that there are I think many

more interdependencies and many of which we just don't don't understand yet but

that are starting to to be illuminated by the by ongoing work. Now at least we know

one of the featured performers.

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