Michael is a coauthor on a new paper titled Imbalance in gut microbial interactions as a marker of health and disease published in Science (PDF is available).
The study shows how the gut microbiome shifts from being dominated by competitive interactions in healthy people to being dominated by cross-feeding interactions in people with a wide range of diseases, ranging from IBD to colorectal cancer. This shows how complex properties of these microbial communities, beyond mere taxonomic diversity, are important to defining their ecological state. It also demonstrates the significance of shifts in ecological interactions within natural microbial ecosystems, which may drive adaptation as studied in our lab in other projects.
