British Gut Project | Hacker News Reader

British Gut Project

britishgut.org

78 pointstokenadult16 comments

Hearing a lot about gut bacteria these days influencing everything from weight loss to allergies. Can anyone with knowledge verify any of these claims or is it, yet, another passing fancy?

The study linked here is one step in trying to find out how many of those claims are credible. What I found interesting about this link, which I heard about from a medical genetics researcher, is that the British Gut Study is connected to the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which has been going on for twenty years, so it will include some data that are from a genetically sensitive study design. That makes it easier (but not completely easy) to tease out environmental influences on gut microbes from individual genetic influences on gut microbes. The study also includes some data on the twins' health and some other variables of interest. The TEDS research program and all of its study subjects are based in Britain, but the study design is of such interest around the world that the United States federal government helps fund it.

I heard about this on the Today programme this morning, the presenter was taking great delight in repeating the name "The British Gut Project".

I bet :)

Try it in a Sean Connery voice... "The British Gut Project"

By sample do they mean I get to send someone my poo for £75 and they will tell me what microbes they found in it?

You could probably just go to a nearby clinical lab and order a stool culture.

Without a diagnosis though (for insurance) I fear what the actual cost would be.

Now I just need to wait for someone knowledgable to tell me more information about this project, after which I will probably sign up and send off my poo.

And pay £75 to pay for their research without, as far as I can find, much information on their methodologies, details on what will happen to your data and how it will be looked after.

It would be more helpful it i knew what kind of protections my data will get.

Where did you get the £75 fee? I only see a mention of £2.90 postage.

I followed the "Make a donation" button from the right-hand side, to: https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/4sSf3/ab/5qJ7f Once there, press the orange "Contribute" button.

I suspect the £75 'donation' came from their 'fundrazr' page: https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/4sSf3/

You seem to have to join via this fundraising site. It's mildly concerning that their participant login site seems to be coming up with an SSL error too ( https://www.microbio.me/BritishGut ). This site also takes you back round to the fundraising page when you select the menu option to join.

I agree that the website is lacking details.

If the project is anything like the American Gut Project (which the page suggests), your data will be made available on GitHub [1]. This paper [2] describes the methodology that was used to generate the data for American Gut.

[1]: https://github.com/biocore/American-Gut.

[2]: Caporaso, J. Gregory, et al. "Ultra-high-throughput microbial community analysis on the Illumina HiSeq and MiSeq platforms." The ISME journal 6.8 (2012): 1621-1624.

The font on the website hurts my eyes, making me squint.

To be fair, given what these researchers look at all day, we can't expect too much from them aesthetically.

Someone took the trouble to choose that font and link it from fonts.googleapis.com. If you ban the google fonts site the default fonts are more than readable (via RequestPolicy extension or some other method).

http://img.nux.ro/Wb9-Selection_035.png

Surveillance from the inside.

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