Jamie Morton, scientist and founder of Gutsy Analytics, talks about his June 2023 paper in Nature Neuroscience entitled, “Multi-level analysis of the gut-brain axis shows autism spectrum disorder-associated molecular and microbial profiles,” in which Jamie and 42 other authors re-analyzed prior datasets to discover new connections between the human gut microbiome and autism.
For a primer on the human microbiome, check out this 2020 review piece that appeared in Nature Medicine: “Current understanding of the human microbiome.”
We discuss:
*Introduction of the terms “human gut microbiome” and “autism” [1:20]
*Jamie’s background as a scientist [4:05];
*How this study got started at the Simons Foundation [5:37];
*Jamie’s interest in autism [7:18];
*Genesis of the research [8:10];
*What is a meta-analysis? [10:47];
*Importance of analyzing previous datasets [11:20];
*Deciding on what kinds of data to focus on [12:30];
*Bringing together different kinds of data to build a functional architecture [14:22];
*Computational modeling ins and outs — batch effect correction, age and sex matching to avoid confounding [15:09];
*Associations between data and autism [18:31], including the surprising overlap between microbial and human pathways [21:15];
*Causality or association? [23:45];
*FMT paper: “Long-term benefit of Microbiota Transfer Therapy on autism symptoms and gut microbiota.\"[24:42];
*What is FMT and what does it do? [25:09];
*Overlap between paper’s research and FMT study — additional validation [27:54]