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.

Every day, you produce one to two liters of spit.

It kickstarts digestion and helps you swallow, and it helps prevent bacterial infection in your mouth.

But that still seemed like a lot of energy put into something if it's only going to do that small task.

Esther Bullitt, a biophysicist at the Boston University School of Medicine.

And we wondered whether there was something else that it was doing as well, that maybe it had

a farther reach than just preventing infections in the mouth.

So she and her team looked farther down the pipes, and whether certain proteins in spit

might also disrupt the

work of bad bugs in the gut. They grew cells taken from the small intestine of a 51-year-old

woman, and they also grew a batch of pathogenic E. coli bacteria, the kind that caused travelers'

diarrhea. The E. coli have little hair-like extensions on them, called Peli, that grab onto the intestinal cells.

But fewer of the E. coli were able to successfully attach to the intestinal cells

when a particular saliva protein, called Histatin 5, was hanging around.

You might think of the E. coli like pirate ships, trying to dock at a port.

What the histatin 5 does is stop the pirate chips,

the bad bugs, from using their ropes, the Peli, to dock. Because if you can't bind,

...