23/12/2011

Science's editors and news staff have selected one scientific Breakthrough of the Year 2011 and nine runners-up. This year's runners-up for Breakthrough of the Year highlight exciting developments in medicine, the history of the universe, human ancestry, and more. One of them is the microbiome research, how researchers found that far from being random, our internal microbial communities fall roughly into three enterotypes. Dr. Francisco Guarner, member of the digestive physiology and physiopathology group at Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), leads the Spanish participation in this investigation.The European consortium MetaHit, participated by VHIR, has analyzed the ecosystem of bacteria that live in the human intestine. VHIR has intervened in the development of the technology to look for bacteria and has contributed with patients. In the investigation also participated the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which has done the analysis of the information. The result of the research, that gut bacteria divides people into 3 types, were published on April 20 in Nature.This investigation of the VHIR is one of three Spanish which appear at the top 10 chosen by Science. The other two are the finding of new ways to tailor the size of zeolite pores and create thinner, cheaper membranes, led in Spain by Avelino Corma of ITQ at Valencia, and the study of the malaria vaccine, led by Pedro Alonso from Cresib. HIV treatment as prevention has been chosen by Science as Breakthrough of the Year. "http://www.vhir.org/salapremsa/mitjans/mitjans_detall.asp?Idioma=en&mv1=5&mv2=1&mh1=0&mh2=0&mh3=0&mh4=0&ms=0&any=2011&num=80" More information about the investigation of the human microbiome