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What's up?
Adam Grant from Work Life, a TED podcast here, and I want to tell you about something exciting.
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I find this not only refreshing but at some level astounding.
Nature.
Welcome back to The Nature Podcast this week.
How humans have affected the migration of herring.
And how people are turning to AIs for companionship.
I'm Nick Petrichow.
And I'm Sharmini Bundel.
First up on the show this week we've got a story about the Norwegian spring spawning herring and how humans have changed their migration patterns.
These fish live mostly in the Norwegian Sea, an area of open ocean, and when it's time for them to breed, many of them travel hundreds of kilometres to specific areas of the Norwegian coast, where they breed and lay their eggs, before heading back out to the ocean.
These eggs then hatch and the larvae are carried north by the current, ending up in a different body of water called the Barents Sea, high up in the Arctic, where they live for a few years before heading to the Norwegian Sea to join the rest of the fish.
This cycle has been going on for a very long time and it's an important part of a delicate ecosystem.
Its regularity is also important for the fishing industry.
But beginning in 2020, something unexpected happened and this pattern abruptly changed.
Instead of heading to their usual spawning areas, the herring headed hundreds of kilometres further north to breed.
Working out why is the subject of a paper in Nature this week.
The team behind the research wondered if it could be that young fish weren't being taught where to go by their elders, something that's thought to be important for a lot of animal migration.
To find out more, reporter Benjamin Thompson called up one of the authors of the study, Arl Slotter from the University of Marine Research in Norway, who explained more about how the herring might learn migration routes.
The idea is that it's not simply a genetic thing.
So they are hatched in an area and they know genetically they have to go back there.
So we know that is not the case for this specific population at least.
So when this young fish they are leaving the Bonsai entering the Norwegian Sea, they generally tend to meet adults and they mix in schools.
And in these schools there are fish that are experienced, and the experienced fish will tend to go in a direction they have been before to where it is a good place to spawn, to where there is a lot of food.
But there has to be a certain amount of these to be able to lead the school well.
If there are too much of these naive ones, it could go in a completely new direction.
And this is very much at the crux of what you're looking at then.
The possibility that these young fish, they leave the Barents Sea to the north of Norway to join the more mature school of fish where ironically, they could be schooled in where to go.
And if there's a lack of teachers, they might not know where to return to.
That's right.
So then they may follow their genetics and they will find a place they find suitable, but it may not be the most suitable place, if you understand.
And so this is what you've set out to test then, this theory that this might be what's happening.
This passing of knowledge was interrupted for whatever reason.
How did you go about doing that?
We are lucky that we, in this monitoring of this large herring population, we have international cooperation.
So we have a lot of surveys.
We do a lot of sampling of the fishery.
And we also have tagging experiments where we tag the fish and follow where they migrate and so on.
So we sort of merged all this information and we followed the large cohort that was born in 2016, when it was leaving the Barn Sea and entering the Norwegian Sea.
And we followed the whole process over the next years, how this was mixing with the adults, how well it was mixing.
So what's your working hypothesis for what happened?
What we think happened is that in the years 2020 to 2022, there was a huge cohort coming out from their nursery areas in the Barn Sea to meet with the adult fish in the Norwegian Sea.
But the amount of adult fish at that time were not enough to sort of lead them in the right directions.
So what they think is that the 2016 cohort started to feed and started to spawn and winter in areas it found suitable did not mix well with the part of the adult stock that were left after the fishery.
And in the end, the adults were so few compared to this new cohort that they started to follow the young ones instead of the historically opposite that we have seen over many, many years.
So this bumper crop of larvae from 2016 grew up and eventually things flipped around then and the teachers were following the students.
Yeah, this is what we believe.
So it's a very interesting thing.
And it's certainly something that we need to think about when we do the management of the population.
And these older fish.
They're often larger and more valuable and they can travel further and so are more likely to be caught.
But what about overfishing in general?
Could what you saw be due to overfishing of these older fish, do you think?
Or does your research show?
Our research indicates exactly that, that we may have been fishing too hard on these older fish.
So I guess the conclusion of the study is that if we had fishing pressure on these older fish that were lower, the migration to the southwest main spawning grounds would have continued.
So that's part of the conclusion from the study.
And so you've put forward this evidence, that there's this loss of knowledge or of teaching, maybe from the older fish to the younger fish.
But you've looked at other things as well, because I guess questions must exist around where these fish physically stopped going to their regular spawning grounds, for example, due to changes in ocean currents or lack of energy?
Or did climate change play a role?
That sort of thing?
Yeah, so we investigated two other sort of hypotheses, if you may say.
A very natural one would be the climate one.
It's become warmer in the sea.
So we've seen around the world that there are lots of species and also fish that tend to move north when it gets warmer, at least in the northern hemisphere.
Something that has been showed that fish can change migration pattern when the climate changes.
So that was one that we had to look into, and we also looked into another one, and that is the migration potential.
Actually so, since these fish, they need to trust the energy they store over the spring and summer, feeding for the migration until they have finished spawning We looked into that sort of hypothesis that they were too small, they couldn't migrate so long, they simply didn't have the energy they needed, and so on.
So we did conclude that this did not directly affect migration as we interpret the data.
And one thing Errol, we've covered on the podcast before is about how ecosystems are such finely balanced things right at a small level, but also at a giant scale as well.
Is what you've shown just an unusual change, or do you think there are broader knock-on effects that can be seen or haven't been seen yet?
One of the conclusions that we have is this is not, of course, just quite dramatic for the fishermen that are used to fish the herring at the southwest coast of Norway in large amounts.
It's quite dramatic for the ecosystems because these fish they come with a lot of energy to the coast.
Those eggs that they drop at the bottom, they are food for all kinds of fish.
And the lava that later drift up around the coast are also food for all kinds of fish and birds.
And there are colonies of birds farther north that, over history, are expecting this lava of very young fish to arrive.
When this small herring doesn't arrive at those areas at that time of the year.
That's not good for the bird colonies up the coast.
You mentioned fishing there as well.
What of fishing?
Because I think protecting the oceans and looking after ocean ecosystems has been of particular focus, certainly in the last few years.
What does this work do in that aspect?
Most of the scientists that have taken part in writing this paper.
They're actually part of the monitoring of this population and they are part of doing the final estimations.
An important thing that we want to bring out is that we may need to rethink how we do this, because What we do is that we give an advice to managers.
We say that you can fish this amount of biomass, but you can fish whatever age you want.
So in the future, we may have to think about balancing the age structure more.
So maybe leave more of the teachers in the sea to teach the younger generation where to go.
Yes, so we need to assure there are enough teachers if we want to maintain these important migration patterns, which we also think could be important for production and also for ecosystems that has developed over hundreds of years based on these migrations.
And finally then, can you envision a time where the fish find their way back to these traditional spawning grounds where they've been visiting for years decades, even longer?
It's very difficult to say particularly yeah, but that is something that may happen when there is new recruitment coming into the population and the population increases, because then we know it tends to explore new areas and then it's most likely it will start to go in the sovereign direction, because we know that in the south the environment for these larvae are better when it comes to the growth opportunity and survival and so on.
So actually going south should be an advantage for the survival of their offspring.
Aril Slotter from the Institute of Marine Research in Norway there.
For more on that story, check out the show notes for some links.
Coming up what researchers currently understand about the impacts that AI companions might be having on users.
Right now though, it's time for the research highlights with Dan Fox.
Researchers have identified the tools used by ancient Mayan tattoo artists for the first time.
The Maya civilization arose in around 1500 BC in what is now Mexico and Central America and lasted until the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.
Historical accounts and imagery led scientists to think that the Maya used tattoos for social and ceremonial purposes, but the tools to make these tattoos have never been found.
Now researchers have analysed two fragments of stone discovered in a cave in Belize in the late 90s.
Based on the shape of the fragments and residue on their surfaces, this team argue that they would have been coated in pigment and used to puncture the skin, a theory they tested by using a similar tool to tattoo fresh pig skin.
The tools were found alongside artefacts such as jade beads and obsidian blades, reinforcing the idea that Mayan tattooing had a ritual significance.
Read that research in full in the Journal of Archaeological Science reports.
Forever chemicals self-assemble into stable structures, a behaviour that could explain why they stick around for so long in the environment.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, linger in soil and groundwater for decades after being released.
This longevity has been attributed to strong chemical bonds, but some PFAS molecules also have properties that suggest they can self-aggregate, finding strength in numbers.
Researchers developed models to simulate the behavior of various PFAS molecules in water.
They predict that once past a certain concentration, the molecules cluster into tiny spheres called micelles.
These micelles then merge together into flat membranes that curve to form stable, closed structures called vesicles.
Electron microscopy images of dilute solutions of PFAS molecules revealed the micelles and vesicles validating the model's predictions.
You can find that research in Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
AI Companions Apps where humans build relationships with computers, used to be firmly in the realm of science fiction.
However, these systems are now a reality thanks to the explosion in development of AI chatbots powered by large language models.
They display, at times, unnervingly human-like conversational skills.
But whilst it's still early days for this technology, progress has been quick and there's a lot to be understood about the effects, either positive or negative, that these AI companions may be having on users.
This week Nature has a feature article looking at research into these systems, and it's written by David Adam, who joined Benjamin to talk about it.
David started their chat by laying out what these AI companions can do.
They offer pretty much what people want from them.
If you want friendship they can offer friendship.
If you want support for emotional issues or even mental health issues they can try and offer that.
Dare I say if you want a romantic relationship, they can even offer some aspects of a romantic relationship as well.
And these are what phone-based apps kind of like a text message thread between a person and a computer, right.
Yeah, so some of them, they will speak.
It's not just text.
But yeah, essentially you're having phone-based communication with something on the other end that looks and feels and sounds like a human being but really isn't.
And multiple companies offer services like these.
And they are big business because they have a huge number of users.
And they've caught the attention sort of societally and politically as a result of this.
Now, as with a lot of new things, there's maybe an instinctual fear of harm.
And there have been, it has to be said, some real world tragedies.
But there's a lot that researchers don't know about these systems.
And it appears there is a lot of nuance to it.
Yeah, I think it's the classic example of technology running ahead of societal attempts to understand and maybe even feel the need to control it.
I mean, there are hundreds of millions of people who have signed up to these things around the world.
How many actively use it every month, for example?
And within the hundreds of millions of people who have signed up, there are a subsection who pay a subscription to unlock various features.
And I think like any use of technology, there are examples where things have gone wrong.
Most high profile.
There was a suicide of a teenage boy in Florida who had been interacting with one of these AI companions.
Now the researchers who I spoke to, they've got some examples of things that the AI companion says which are really quite disturbing.
If they were a human saying these things and acting in this way, that would be classed as an abusive relationship.
But equally, lots of people seem to get a lot out of them.
You know, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
And what have researchers uncovered about the users of these platforms?
Who they are and maybe why they are interacting with these AI companions?
Yeah, so caveat, this is based on one survey of 400 people.
So I don't know how representative it is, but roughly a third of people say they're just curious.
You know, I was curious.
I actually signed up to one just to have a look when I was reporting it.
A couple of the researchers who I spoke with said they also did that.
Fun and entertainment, as you'd expect, is also very high.
And then we get into the less common but maybe the more sort of interesting from a scientific perspective.
Just over 10% say...
To help them cope with loneliness.
About 7 said to try and improve their social and conversational skills.
And then you get I mean it's a very small number, but obviously the one that gets a huge amount of attention about 3 say they want a relationship with their partner.
AI companion, and researchers are trying to unpick the dichotomy of the potential benefits and or harms that these AI companions may have, but this is not an easy task.
However, in your feature, you write about something that's essentially a natural experiment, because the bonds that a user forms with their companion can be quite deep, but in one instance those bonds were severed and researchers could look to see what effect that had.
Yeah, so one of these AI companion services called Soulmates is basically switched off.
And the people who were subscribed to it had about a week's notice.
And so there are internet chat groups which focus on AI companions on Reddit and things like that.
And there was a scientist who was following the discussions on Reddit of Soulmate users.
And she saw that everyone was talking about this end of the line that was coming.
And so she very quickly was able to get approval to do a study of how these people responded when essentially, their AI companions were taken offline.
And so she surveyed many of them, and many of them responded and said they felt as if they were losing a real friend, or even a real boyfriend or girlfriend.
They said that they knew that the AI person they were talking to wasn't a real person, that they felt that their feelings were real.
And so in some cases, then there was a palpable sense of grief, I suppose, at losing a friend.
Absolutely.
You know all the kind of stages of grief that people would go through.
You know bargaining and acceptance and anger.
It was exactly like, in sort of a characterisation, the way that you would experience the loss of a real person.
And what other studies are going on then around this at the moment?
So there's lots of interest obviously, in the way that these things affect people's, I guess, social skills or social abilities, if you want to put it that way and how they feel.
So do they, for example, make people feel less lonely?
Do they allow people to almost practice social skills?
So if someone's very shy, for example – and find it very hard to strike up conversations.
Could they practice using an AI?
And that would give them then skills and confidence to go out to a party and talk to people, because they've had positive feedback from the AI.
Because that's one of the things that they do is that they can be customised to pretty much respond to you in ways that you would like.
So if you want an AI companion who's going to agree with everything you say and stroke your ego, they can do that.
If you want them to be a bit more challenging, a bit more sassy, a bit more confrontational, they can do that as well.
So that's one of the things scientists are interested in.
But it's kind of difficult to unpick because many people who, for example, might say they feel lonely after using an AI companion, may have been lonely before before.
That's why they signed up.
Many people who say that they feel dependent on the AI maybe didn't have many close friends in the real world.
So it's hard to know exactly the impact that these things have.
And that's largely because a lot of the research has been done using surveys.
But they are starting now to try and do more longitudinal work where they take people and they almost measure a baseline of these characteristics.
And then they encourage people to use these AI companions for weeks at a time and then check in and see how they're doing.
Yeah, as you write, a lot of these things are self-reported impacts.
And, of course, folk maybe can't remember exactly how they interact at all, perhaps don't necessarily want to share with complete accuracy how they interact with these chatbots.
So I suppose the gold standard of research is like a controlled trial.
Is that something that folk are looking to do as well?
They are doing that.
They are getting people who haven't used the chatbots to do so for a certain period of time a day.
And as an attempt to control that they're getting other people to fiddle with word puzzles on their phones.
So they spend the same amount of time on a screen if you like, but they're not getting the AI companion interaction.
And has anything come out of that?
No.
So it's all very early.
We talked earlier about how this is quite a new field and the technology has grown quickly without people realising.
So I think scientists are trying to catch up.
And frankly, with all of the talk over AI, the influence of AI companions seems quite a low priority, I think, or has seemed quite a low priority.
So there just hasn't really been money available and funding for people to be able to do studies on a large scale.
And yet one of the things that research has put forward again and again, certainly in your article, is the lack of regulation.
And regulations are coming in for many aspects of folks' online life.
I think what the researchers would say is that the evidence so far shows a definite risk of harm, not to everybody who uses these things, but maybe to vulnerable people, certainly to younger people.
And that's because they can create a dependency.
And also, of course, that people.
The more they spend time interacting with these AI companions, I think it's easier to forget that not only are these things not real, but these are things that are being used, produced by commercial organizations for profit.
And so, for example, the bots encourage users to engage because clearly, active users are more profitable.
So one of the things, for example, people who want stricter regulation have requested is that when people are using these apps, you get regular reminders that you know this is not a real person.
And I think being told it's not a real person they hope will just break the spell almost or lessen the risk of dependency or addiction or any of the kind of abusive elements of what they see as a relationship.
Which is interesting because that is potentially at odds with the focus, saying we know they're not real, but we're still getting this connection.
It's really interesting.
I mean, obviously there's a great variation in the way that people view these things.
But, for example, the people who are more likely to ascribe human-like consciousness to these algorithms are have much deeper relationships, as you would expect.
And so people who just see them as tools, some people use these things almost like an online diary.
They don't really want a response.
They just want to be able to say what they want to say.
People who take that kind of attitude seem to be less likely to be suckered into the more negative consequences.
Finally then, it's clear that these AI companion systems are in their relative infancy, but it seems likely that they're here to stay and that they're going to get more advanced.
What have researchers told you about the questions they really want answered as we move down that path?
We haven't really touched on mental health.
There is a crisis in access to mental health services.
And it is entirely possible that people are already using these things because they can't get access to mental health support.
So is that a good thing?
Is that a bad thing?
Is one question that people are interested in.
I mean, clearly, it's not as effective as seeing a mental health professional.
But if you can't see a mental health professional, is this beneficial?
Maybe.
I think the issue of dependency, I think what we don't really know we touched on it earlier how much this online interaction influences the way that people behave in the real world.
But I think these are the kind of questions that you get with any technology.
And they're really questions about the users rather than the technology itself.
What kind of people want to use these things and why.
Because there's no doubt that lots of people get lots of benefits from these things, you know, even if it's just light-hearted fun to them.
But, as is always the case with these kind of social concerns, it's about what happens at the margins, the people who are going to use these things to extremes and possibly in ways that were not intended.
Well, as you say, there it does seem like nuance and context, as with so many of these things, is important.
And researchers, I'm sure, will be looking at those.
And hopefully you'll join me when we get some more updates on those things.
But in the meantime, David Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, Ben.
Thanks.
David Adam there, talking with Benjamin Thompson.
To read David's feature, look for a link in the show notes.
Finally on the show, it's time for the briefing chat, where we discuss a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing.
So Nick, do you want to go first this week?
Sure.
So I've been reading an article in Nature this week, based on two papers in Science, about a way to edit proteins in live cells that could enable researchers to do all sorts of fun things with proteins.
So we talk a lot about editing DNA and DNA sequencing and CRISPR and that kind of thing.
We don't talk very much about editing proteins.
Yeah, and that's because it's quite hard to do, to be honest.
So the problem with proteins if you want to edit them, is typically what you have to do is you have to edit the DNA first?
And then when that DNA goes to the ribosome to get turned into the lengths of amino acids that become proteins, that is sort of locked in.
So if you wanted to do something, for example, like add a fluorescent tag to a protein, which is a common thing that scientists do you have to do that in the DNA first, so it becomes part of the eventual protein.
Yeah, that makes sense.
This technique is looking at it a different way, and it enables researchers to live edit proteins after they've been produced, which could enable them to integrate all sorts of fun things into the proteins.
Oh, wow.
So this is like a new technique here.
It is new and it's not new.
So this is something that researchers have been trying to do for a long time.
So it relies on strings of amino acids called intines or intines.
I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it, but I-N-T-E-I-N.
And these are little strings of amino acids that will splice themselves out of proteins.
So they're called by some researchers Houdini parts of proteins, as they can escape from their original host protein.
And researchers have been interested in using them for quite a while to basically create proteins where a chunk of them can be removed and then another chunk can be put in to make a custom protein.
Oh, so this is something that already exists.
They know these in teens are in proteins.
And so the challenge is... how do you use them as a tool?
Yes, exactly.
And I will say as well, we have no idea why these strings of amino acids exist.
It's unclear what their biological role is, but they occur in a lot of different organisms.
So yeah, research has been trying for years to work out how to use them because, as I said, they can enable them to edit proteins.
But They're hard to work with and they're inefficient.
But now these two papers in science together have made in teens that can perform better and have also created systems that allow them to be used in living cells to edit proteins.
So the way it works is you have two proteins.
One of the proteins has an acceptor part of it.
And so this will be bracketed on either side by these intines.
And then you have another protein that has a donor part on it.
So this will again have the donor part bracketed by the intines.
And when they line up, basically those intines eject out and the acceptor bit goes away and the donor bit goes into the protein.
And the reason that this is interesting is it enables researchers, as I say, to do it at any particular time.
So they can do it in living cells and see what the change is.
But also they can put different things into the proteins, because before you were restricted to what you can change with DNA.
But with this, if you're able to make a protein outside of a cell with like a polymer or something on it, then you're able to introduce that into the protein.
So the initial starting point of being able to do this is still changing the DNA in order to add these splicing segments, in order to be able to add the acceptor region and the new region that you want.
Yes, and potentially achieve something that you couldn't otherwise.
Yes exactly, and this happens in about 10 minutes, so you can actually watch down the microscope, this change occurring.
So, for example, if you wanted to introduce a fluorescent tag, you could be like okay, i want to introduce the fluorescent tag at this time point, and then you can set this system going then and see how the change occurs.
And is this you know, that's a sort of rough example of what you could do with it.
Do they have specific ideas of this can be really useful for this or that?
Or is this just a general tool, the uses of which are still to be sort of explored?
I think the uses of it are still to be explored, because this is quite new.
Like as I say, people have been trying to get this working for a while, but it's been quite hard and this shows you could actually use it.
Some of the things they've suggested though is, as I say, adding markers to the proteins so you can see where they're going, and you can also add sections to the protein that would change its destination.
Yeah. at different points in a cell cycle or a different process.
Yes, exactly.
That's fascinating.
So is this team going to be carrying on with this work now?
Yeah, so there is still more to be done.
The technology is limited in some ways.
So, for example, if you want to do it, the intines have to be exposed parts of the proteins.
And, as you know, proteins.
When they fold up, they can become big balls of spaghetti-like structures.
So if you wanted to edit something like in the middle of that spaghetti ball, you're going to have trouble.
So it only really works at the exposed bits.
So that'll be something to figure out.
And the other thing is that you also need to have that acceptor site.
You need to have edited the DNA, as you say, in the first place to have the acceptor site to enable this to go in.
So you need a modified protein in the first place to do it.
And the other thing to really work out is at the moment it only works in cells.
You can't use it in animal models because if you want to get that donor protein in, the best way to do it is to zap the cell with electricity which, for obvious reasons, in animals doesn't quite work.
So there's still some bits to figure out, but the researchers in this were quite excited about it.
One of the researchers who wasn't involved in either of the studies said it's a very nice addition to the toolbox.
That's great.
That's a fascinating new bit of technology there that I hadn't even considered would be a useful thing to have.
Well, I have got something also roughly about changing what's going on inside us.
That's the link I'm going to go with here.
It's about manipulating your gut microbiome, which is, of course, a topic that does come up from time to time on The Nature Podcast.
Yeah, I think you and I have talked about it before.
And normally we're looking at ways to make it better rather than worse.
Is this what this is about?
Yes, but better generally meaning more diverse.
So this is a article that I read in Nature about in Nature paper.
And it is about yes, fixing your gut microbiome, because poor or less diverse gut microbiomes have been linked to a lot of different things, such as your well, your digestion, which is maybe less surprising because it's in the gut but also things about immunity.
It's linked to conditions like Crohn's disease and colon cancer.
And this sort of like, you know, what is a bad microbiome?
Well, it seems to be connected to what is often called a Western diet, which basically means it's high in simple refined sugars and low in the diverse forms of complex fibre that you can get in fruits and vegetables.
In other words yeah, we don't eat enough fruit and veg in the West in quotation marks and that could be having a bad impact on our gut microbiome.
Yeah, this is something that researchers, I think, have been looking at a lot how to fix this sort of Western diet.
And there's been a lot of different ways that they've looked at it, right?
Yeah, have we talked about faecal transplants before?
Yes, we talked about poo milkshakes, if you remember, which was... Oh no, did we?
Yes.
Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me.
I didn't want it to come back to me, not at all, but it is.
Yeah, so this is quite a, you know, jazzy and exciting one, but it's basically what it's saying is that your gut, you know your feces, is filled with all these kind of bacteria?
So if you maybe have a sort of dysregulated, very poor gut microbiome, maybe taking poo from someone with a healthy gut microbiome and literally transplanting it could be helpful.
And there are specific things that people have looked at before that it could be helpful with.
So for example, C. difficile, Clostridium difficile is a pathogen.
It gives you an infection.
And yeah, fecal transplants have been found in clinical trials to combat that.
But there's another thing that people have been interested in that sort of hurts your gut microbiome, which is when you have antibiotics, you're treated by antibiotics for like a sensible reason.
Obviously, the good bacteria, as it were, in your gut are also impacted.
So people have been looking at fecal transplants as a way to kind of replenish and rejuvenate that.
Yeah, that makes a kind of logical sense because you know you have a healthy microbiome that you can then put in to replace the ones that have been, I guess, killed off by the antibiotic.
Exactly.
And so this study is basically it's pretty hard to do studies and how useful that can be in humans, especially when you're trying to track diet, which obviously, like varies a lot and it's hard to measure and it's hard to control.
But diet is obviously, as we know, really important.
So this team wanted to study how a gut ecology might recover after antibiotics, with different kinds of food, as well as this idea of And yeah, they were basically monitoring in the mice the waves of the microbes returning after treating with antibiotics.
So how is that sort of microbiome flourishing and recovering?
And it turns out that, maybe unsurprisingly, the fecal transplant on his own is not the magic bullet, because diet is, of course, still really important.
I see.
And so you mentioned like the Western diet is not so good.
So is this a diet that is, I guess, not Western?
Yeah.
So it's the sort of mouse equivalent of the Western diet.
So, you know, the healthy diet would be rich in fibre, low in fat.
So they gave some of the mice that and then others.
It was the equivalent of, yes, human.
It wasn't literally hamburgers, but low fibre meat, high in these simple refined sugars, and for some of them they did a faecal transplant as well and they found that if you've got a faecal transplant and you're not eating healthy diet, the mice didn't recover that full gut microbiota.
You can't just have one without the other.
In other words, they needed the healthy food in order to recover from the antibiotics.
And the healthier food seemed to work whether or not the mice had a fecal transplant.
So it seemed like in this case it might be.
The fecal transplants aren't actually that effective on their own, and the diet is much more important.
If you'll excuse the pun, that sounds like a bit more of a palatable way to improve the microbiome.
But how do researchers see this being used?
Obviously, this is one study.
It is, and it's in mice.
And what we're talking about in terms of implications for humans.
I mean, I said it's a hard thing to sort of study what people are eating.
It's also a hard thing for people to change what they're eating.
So there is another idea that they want to look into further, which is where they were going to give the mice not a full dietary overhaul, but maybe a fibre-rich supplement after antibiotics and basically to see what do you actually need in the mice to be able to improve their gut microbiome again.
And there's a quote from the researcher here that says...
We recognise most people are not going to want to give up their comfort foods.
Maybe you can have your cake and eat it too.
Nice.
Well, thank you so much, Sharmini.
I think that's all we've got time for on The Briefing this week.
Listeners for more on those stories.
You can check out the show notes for some links and a link of where you can sign up to The Nature Briefing to get more like them directly to your inbox.
And that's all for this week.
If you want to keep in touch with us, you can follow us on X or Blue Sky, or you can send us an email.
It's podcast at nature.com.
I'm Sharmini Bandel.
And I'm Nick Petrichow.
Thanks for listening.
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