Part 1: the savior of beet, wine, and silk industries — Pasteur’s Youth, From Boy to Chemist As a boy in the 1820s, Pasteur grew up in Arbois, France. He spent a lot of time in books and had the ambition to teach other boys. He became an instructor and then an assistant teacher in Bezançon. His father sent him to Paris to the prestigious Normal School…

Travel back 4 centuries, to Delft and the unexpected first step of microbiology — If you are well-bathed in the probiotics world, read the stories of microbiology, or visited the Micropia museum in Amsterdam, of course, you’ve heard of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek. But what do you really know about the man and his discoveries? Meet the simple merchant who made history. Get acquainted with…

A pragmatic guide towards a low-carbon lifestyle transition, from “How Bad are Bananas” by Mike Berners-Lee — The heat waves in Europe, accelerating forest fires, watching my garden and nature across the continent wither dry, and the absence of political will to transition to a low-carbon economy have prompted an unprecedented surge of eco-anxiety in me. But panic won’t help. What will? …

All you need to know about this trendy fermented drink — Chances are you’ve heard of kombucha before and maybe have even had a taste of this strange drink, but what it really is and what benefits it holds still remain a mystery to you. This is why I scouted scientific reviews and wrote this. What is kombucha? Kombucha is a mildly sweet and…

As if you needed a reason for that chill — Diversity In the matter of gut microbiome ecology, scientists still don’t know precisely what is a healthy microbiota. Everyone has a different setup, some bacteria can be good markers or bad markers depending on the rest of the environment and their quantity. …

Aphids and Buchnera, a well-studied example to grasp life’s interconnectedness — I discovered this story in Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, a wonderful book about the ubiquity and variety of forms taken by symbiosis in the living realm, which I recommend to any curious mind open to the holobiont idea: that life is an interweaving of organisms nested the ones into…

Bringing clarity to the beneficial microbes categories — There is a lot of confusion between the terms probiotics, fermented foods, and dietary microbes, and what they imply. Magazines, the internet, and product labels are mixed up. Even the probiotics and food industries seem to get disoriented at times. Here is a recap for better use of the terminology. 1. Probiotics …

Every drug gets to microbes first — The development of drugs from discovery to phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 evaluates safety but never took into account the impact of the drugs on the microbiota as a possible side effect. What Martin Blaser and his research exposed in his famous book Missing Microbes was the inception…

What’s a species, what’s a strain, why it matters — In the probiotics sector, there is a consensus that products should label the microorganisms they contain down to the strain level. The International Probiotics Association (IPA) writes it clearly in its labelling infographic, as does the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP). However, a report by Lumina Intelligence…