Meet Professor Glenn Gibson

In the previous Step, you quantified the number of aerobic bacteria in a sample of food to determine if it was safe to eat. In this Step, I meet with Professor Glenn Gibson to discuss how he has developed experimental glass models of the human gut to research the effects of diet on the human microbiome and how gut microbes affect our health.

If you’d like to find out more about the gut model and see it in action, watch this video from another University of Reading online course, A History of Royal Food and Feasting. In this film, Glenn’s students describe how they investigated what Henry VIII’s gut microbiota may have looked like if he had eaten a “meat-heavy” diet and how this may have impacted on his health.

Having watched this discussion with Glenn, what benefits do you think there are from using gut models to test hypotheses about the effects of diet on the gut microbiome before progressing to human trials? Share your thoughts in the comments area below.

Further reading

• Expanding Our View of the Human Microbiome on NIH Director’s Blog.