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.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher Entagata. Got a minute?

A malaria infection begins when a mosquito injects the plasmodium parasite into the blood.

But getting sick is not a certain outcome.

The vast majority of people really only develop either mild malaria or even asymptomatic infections.

Nathan Schmidt, a cellular immunologist at the University of Louisville.

It's a very small subset of the hundreds of millions of cases that progressed to severe malaria.

Now, some of the variation in illness severity is genetic, or whether the patient's partially immune,

thanks to past exposures. But Schmidt and his colleagues have found another factor that could

influence the disease, the host microbiome. The first clue came during an experiment in lab mice,

because even though the mice were almost identical genetically, mice that had been bought from

different vendors showed variability in their response to infection by the malaria parasite.

Turns out, the mice had different microbiomes.

So the researchers did more tests.

They transplanted the gut bugs of both the resistant and the susceptible animals into other

mice that had no gut bacteria. And again,

mice that now had the resistant microbial mix were spared the worst of a malaria infection,

possibly through some sort of booster effect on their immune system, thanks to the microbes.

...