Microbiome yarns: The Global Phenotype‐Genotype Survey. Episode III: importance of microbiota diversification for microbiome function and biome health

According to a world‐renowned expert, , the microbial contents of the GI tract may be an important ‐ hitherto unappreciated ‐ supply chain of essential trace nutrients present in microbes that we digest and thus exploit as food. [...]with a few exceptions, there is little robust epidemiological evidence for the pathogenic ability of most environmental bugs related in some way to microbes causing nosocomial infections, and hence for them to represent a health hazard. [...]phylogenetic assignments regularly change as they are updated, entraining alterations in previously‐proposed (perceived) relationships with other bugs, so assigning a taxonomic label that relates an environmental bug to a microbe that has at some point in the past been implicated in an infection, and then concluding without any causal evidence that the environmental relative is a hazard, is a highly dubious practice often used in an attempt to add attention‐catching drama to descriptive studies lacking design to test the hypothesis that is proposed. [...]public health agencies have pretty much defined real sources and routes of environmental infections, like water supply lines and cooling systems for things like Legionella, shellfish for Vibrio, freshwater bodies for Leptospira, etc. [...]initial studies to determine how Slop and Sloj induce slobber flow suggests that they produce both a hormone‐like compound they designated canine slobber‐inducing compound, or CSIC, that turns up production of saliva by the dog, and a new biosurfactant they designated soap‐like oral substance, or SLOSH, that acts like soap, turning all that extra saliva into a soapsud‐like slobber full of microbes growing in the buccal cavity.