A new bacteria, made in Belgium (and UCLouvain)

In brief: A research team from University of Louvain (UCLouvain) has discovered a new bacterium in the human intestine. Therefore, they were allowed to give it a name, which is now used all over the world: Dysosmobacter welbionis The next step? The UCLouvain scientists have discovered positive effects of this bacterium on type 2 diabetes, obesity and inflammation The originality of this discovery? It is extremely rare that a single research team identifies, cultivates, names a bacterium and then reveals its action in the human body , a first in Belgium and published in the prestigious journal Gut Article : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2020-323778 It all started, when Patrice Cani, FNRS researcher at University of Louvain (UCLouvain), and his team repeatedly observed that a bacterium (called Subdoligranulum ) is almost absent in obese and diabetic people, while it is systematically present in healthy people. So, they decided to take a closer look at this "family" of bacteria. There is as yet only one cultivated strain of this family available in the world (the only known member of a large family) and, no luck, it is not the strain that was observed to be decreased in sick people. This is not unusual: nearly 70% of bacteria in the intestine have not yet been identified (this is called the dark matter of the intestine). In 2015, the team then set out to isolate the bacterium themselves in order to learn about its action on the human body, knowing that it is only present in healthy people.