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.

Yachtold 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.

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.JP. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Shayla Farsan.

A couple billion years ago, about three billion, to be a little more precise, the Earth was a very

different place. It had vast oceans and almost no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was a place where bacteria ruled.

Some of these bacteria used photosynthesis to power themselves, kind of like plants, but they did it in a strange way, by harnessing light and stealing electrons from iron.

Fast forward about two billion years, and those bacteria still exist today. They're called

photopheritrophes, and for decades, scientists thought they were pretty rare. Most people think

that all these exotic organisms that do other things and photopheritrophy is just something that

they might have retained from the past.

Arpita Bose is a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

In 2015, on a whim, Bowes collected some vials of marine sediment from Witshole, Massachusetts,

and brought them home to her lab in Missouri.

Her students slowly parsed out the individual strains of bacteria,

and they started testing them, one by one, trying to figure out if any of them still had that

ancient metabolism. Boz still remembers the day two of her students came into her office with the

results. They were like, they all do it. They all do photopheritrophy. And they were like, they all do it.

They all do photopheritrophie.

And I was like, what?

...