Jamie Morton on Finding Associations Between the Microbiome and Autism -- Part 1

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]

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