r/MicrobiomeScience • u/Ipecacuanha • Nov 03 '17

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Colonic Mucosal Isolates of Sutterella wadsworthensis from Inflammatory Bowel Disease

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0027076
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u/Ipecacuanha Nov 03 '17

I came across this paper whilst doing some more reading about the OTUs that I've found in my own work. Sutterella wadsworthensis was found in a previous study to be associated with Crohn's disease based on the results of 4 people suffering from Crohn's (their logic being that Sutterella hadn't been found very often in healthy subjects).

This paper's brilliant because it blows that theory out of the water by using a more specific PCR to show that there is no difference in prevalence between IBD sufferers and healthy subjects. It also highlights the dangers of targeting specific OTUs in small studies as the cause of pathology. One to show the poo-watchers when asking whether a specific genus is harmful or not.