A parasitic amoeba that causes severe gut disease in humans protects itself from attack by biting off pieces of host cells and putting their proteins on its own surface, according to a study by microbiologists at the University of California, Davis. “We’re very excited about how this ties into amoebic infection and into broader themes in cell biology,” said Katherine Ralston, assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, College of Biological Sciences.

Katherine Dahlhausen's microbial curiosity was inspired by a bacterial disease she contracted while traveling. Today, she's a student in the Biophysics Graduate Group and works in the lab of Professor Jonathan Eisen. She helped uncover that treatments meant to combat chlamydia in koalas actually hurt important gut microbes.

Professor Bruce German of the UC Davis Food Science & Technology department has spent the past two decades studying lactation and its role in evolution. Among the findings of a group of scientists from across the campus: human milk contains a large proportion of oligosaccharides — short chains of sugar molecules — that babies can’t digest, so they “run right through them.” (If you have a certain kind of diaper-changing experience, you know what this looks like.) The question was, why? German joined with Professor Carlito Lebrilla from the UC Davis chemistry department and School of Medicine to analyze these amazingly complex oligosaccharides. German suspected that these oligosaccharides existed to nourish bacteria, not the baby. He turned to colleague Professor David Mills, a UC Davis molecular biologist, to find out which bacteria could digest these human milk oligosaccharides.

University of California, Davis, microbiologist Jonathan Eisen has been outspoken in his disdain for the burgeoning biome market, calling out one of the companies on Twitter as the “Theranos of microbiome companies” a reference to the infamous blood-testing firm whose founder was indicted on fraud charges in June.  “I just think that it’s early to be saying that we can make recommendations about what people should do based upon one of these microbiome diagnostics,” said Eisen.