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.

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

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

Probiotics are hot.

Bacteria that we consume in foods like yogurt, miso, and pickles can help our gut microbiomes stay happy and healthy.

Now there might be another role for those probiotic bacteria, cancer detection.

Two papers in the journal Science Translational Medicine explain how researchers

hope to get bacteria to be diagnostic tools. Sangita Batya of MIT is a liver expert and

senior author of one of the papers. Her lab had been trying to figure out how to get nanoparticles

to the liver that would send a signal detectable in urine if they encountered a tumor.

Cancers that start in the colon or pancreas can metastasize to the liver, which can be deadly.

And one of the students on the team had the idea that if you could imagine that there's a material,

it's a diagnostic material that would grow itself, then you wouldn't need very much of it to arrive

at the tumor and it could sort of

self-amplify. And we realized that bacteria are in many ways just such a device, that they can

naturally home in on tumors. So we thought maybe we could hijack that ability of bacteria to

home in on tumors and self-amplify to create a urinary diagnostic.

Baccia's lab teamed up with a lab at the University of California, San Diego, with expertise

in synthetic biology, basically altering microbes to have specific functions.

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