[jcoq]

I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity, and which goes through a small amount of effort to summarize the growing (if not clearly established) scientific consensus about the importance of healthy gut biomes.

I don't think it takes very much imagination to understand why the loss of diversity in an ecosystem might have negative implications for that ecosystem.

For whatever it's worth to you, Science magazine is a companion to the extremely prestigious Science Journal and it often tries to summarize the research in the journal. The tiniest amount of searching shows that the biologist whose work is being summarized a is one of the leading experts in this area.

[mulmen]

> I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity

As I already said, it doesn’t largely do that. It mentions it in literally one paragraph that is itself mostly fluff.

The most substantive line is literally “with computers”:

> With computers, they were able to compile the fragments of DNA sequenced into whole genomes of the gut microbes present.

There’s no further mention of how these computers work or what they do or what is novel about them. And that’s the most interesting part of the piece.

[watwut]

Most of article is tldr of various researches with links if you are interested in how they collected poop to make tests or used computers.