Identifying Unknown Microbial Metabolites Circulating in Human Blood

Will Van Treuren
Graduate Student
Sonnenburg Lab
Stanford University

Will Van Treuren presents the work he is doing as part of his doctoral thesis at Stanford University. He notes that there are 40 million microbes in the human body, with 99.9 percent of them located in the oral cavity, large intestine, and small intestine. His research focuses on the microbes found in the intestines. Van Treuren explains that because human blood concentrates metabolic waste products from cells, this has led him to explore two research questions: (1) Are there microbial analogues of inborn errors in metabolism? (2) Can humans acquire a community whose metabolites cause disease?

Recorded: March 9, 2018