The human body is teeming with thousands of species of microbes that affect health. A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim.
The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin. more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten.
Commenting on the research, Prof Julian Parkhill, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said he expected a future when manipulating bacteria was a part of obesity treatment. "There's a lot of work to do, but this is proof of concept that bacteria in the gut can modulate obesity in adults, but it is diet-dependent," he said. He added that changing bacteria was a promising field for other diseases.
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