On the seventh episode of The Microbiome Podcast we had a great conversation with Drs. Eugene Chang and Vanessa Leone from the University of Chicago. Drs. Chang and Leone found that bacteria in the gut influence the circadian clock in mice. They discovered that altering the diet of the mouse by introducing a high-fat diet caused conventionally raised mice to have a disrupted circadian clock and became obese. They looked at what genes were expressed in the liver and found that the genes expressed varied widely from mice that were germ-free and those that were normal and conventionally raised. We talked with them about this work and what influence this could have on humans and on our eating and sleeping patterns.

Listen to the podcast here on our website, here on iTunes, and here on Stitcher.

Below are more detailed show notes:

Two scientific talks that David saw in New York City. First (0:37), a talk by AMI Scientific Advisory Board member Marty Blaser about antibiotics and obesity. We then (1:23) discussed a talk by Chris Mason about the microbiome and his study on the microbes in the NYC transit system. Dr. Mason published his slides on twitter so if you’re interested in seeing his slides, you can see them here.
(2:26) Dr. Tim Spector from Kings College London had his son eat only McDonalds for 10 days straight. His son lost approximately 40% of the bacterial diversity in his gut. Read more about it here.
(3:40) The British Gut Project that Dr. Tim Spector leads, a partner of The American Gut Project. Check out the British Gut Project.
(5:37) A company called Biomecite Diagnostics that licensed technology from The University of Maryland School of Medicine to develop molecular diagnostics to detect inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Read more here.
(6:10) We gave an overview of diurnal changes, circadian clock, and the microbiome.
(9:21) We began the interview with Drs. Chang and Vanessa Leone and discussed their paper that found that cirdcadian clocks were influenced by gut microbes. Read the paper in Cell Host and Microbe. Read our blog post about this work.
(11:47) Dr. Leone discussed a few seminal papers from 2014 about diurnal changes. Read this paper about jet-lag and the microbiome.
(34:15) After the interview with Drs. Chang and Leone we talked about our own sleep patterns.
(37:18) We gave our own opinions on Deflategate and Bill goes on a little rant about the Patriots, Tom Brady, and deflated footballs.