[Editorial] The human gut microbiome: still more questions than answers

Abstract

The public view on the gut microbiome is easily gleaned from a scan of the papers or the phone screen: advertisements for the best gut health drinks and advice pieces on whether a daily shot of olive oil will improve your intestinal microbiome. For what seems like a modern fixation, research into the human microbiome has a long history. In 1681, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote about observations on his own stool samples, describing “more than 1000 living animalcules”. The next 300 years were a slow burn for microbiome research, with bacterial culture either ineffective or impossible for most microbes present in this complex ecosystem.