Your microbiome is an important aspect of your health. Caring for your gut biome with healthy bacteria and keeping it in good stasis can change your world and benefit your overall health.

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Until recently, studies of the gut-brain relationship have mostly shown only correlations between the state of the microbiome and operations in the brain. But new findings are digging deeper, building on research that demonstrates the microbiome’s involvement in responses to stress. Focusing on fear, and specifically on how fear fades over time, researchers in 2019 tracked how behavior differs in mice with diminished microbiomes. They identified differences in cell wiring, brain activity and gene expression, and they pinpointed a brief window after birth when restoring the microbiome could still prevent the adult behavioral deficits. They even tracked four particular compounds that may help to account for these changes. While it may be too early to predict what therapies could arise once we understand this relationship between the microbiome and the brain, these concrete differences substantiate the theory that the two systems are deeply entwined.

How scientist performed their experiment with mice:

The researchers performed classical behavioral training on mice, some of which had been given antibiotics to dramatically diminish their microbiomes and some of which had been raised in isolation so that they had no microbiome at all. All the mice learned equally well to fear the sound of a tone that was followed by an electric shock. When the scientists discontinued the shocks, the ordinary mice gradually learned not to fear the sound. But in the mice with depleted or nonexistent microbiomes, the fear persisted — they remained more likely to freeze at the sound of the tone than the untreated mice did.