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Postdoctoral fellows are the lifeblood of research institutions, yet their contributions are often underrecognized. At the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), postdocs enter the scientific workforce with passion, vision, and advanced training – bringing the fresh ideas that fuel discovery.

Everybody poops, but not every day. An ISB-led research team examined the clinical, lifestyle, and multi-omic data of more than 1,400 healthy adults. How often people poop, they found, can have a large influence on one’s physiology and health.

New ISB research shows that different patient responses to statins can be explained by the variation in the human microbiome. The findings were published in the journal Med, and suggest that microbiome monitoring could be used to help optimize personalized statin treatments.

The strongest associations with weight loss success or failure – independent of BMI – are found in the genetic capacity of the gut microbiome. These new findings open the door to diagnostic tests that can identify people likely to lose weight with healthy lifestyle changes and those who might need more drastic interventions.

ISB’s research into the aging microbiome was featured in a story published by Anahad O’Connor for The New York Times titled “A Changing Gut Microbiome May Predict How Well You Age.” The research featured was published in Nature Metabolism by Drs. Tomasz Wilmanksi, Noa Rappaport, Sean Gibbons and Nathan Price.

The gut microbiome is an integral component of the body, but its importance in the human aging process is unclear. ISB researchers and their collaborators have identified distinct signatures in the gut microbiome that are associated with either healthy or unhealthy aging trajectories, which in turn predict survival in a population of older individuals.