Presenter: Noah Wilson
Authors: Noah Wilson
Faculty Advisor: Lauren Brooks
Institution: Utah Valley University
The human gut microbiome is a vast and ever-changing ecosystem that plays a vital role in our health. As the scientific community has studied this essential system, we’ve learned that it is sensitive to changes in diet and medication. These changes disrupt the equilibrium and can negatively impact our health. Traditionally, studies of the human gut have consisted of collecting stool samples of participants before, during, and after treatment. This approach poses many issues, the main being that it’s a gamble. We never know what side effects may happen until after they have happened. The alternative often relies on animal models, which can be expensive and hard to justify when their natural gut microbiome varies greatly from our own. To test impacts of changes on the human gut, we needed an alternative that protects human health and provided accurate data. In this research, we tested MiPro Culture media, a culturing method that has been reported to accurately mimic the human gut. To assess the validity of this media as a model of the human gut, we used anaerobic conditions to culture gut microbiota using MiPro media inoculated with a stool sample. Samples of rRNA were collected every three hours for the next 12 hours to compare the relative abundance in the model to that of the initial gut sample. This allowed us to assess whether this culturing technique provided accurate shifts in relative abundance, comparable to those seen in vivo.