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It turns out that there’s a lot of other crap in your crap other than bacteria, and many of them could plausibly have a biological effect.
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Several other components are found in significant concentration, including archaea, fungi, and microbial eukaryotes.
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The paper is open access and well worth reading. Frankly, it had never occurred to me if the rest of the contents of feces were playing a role. But this question is critically important as scientists and physicians consider developing therapies on the microbes in the gut.
Just recently, a clinical trial for SER-109, the pill being developed by Ceres,
completely bombed. This might be because they didn’t have the right cocktail of bugs, but could it also be because of some of these other components in stool? Very possibly.
