Nature 534, 259–262 (2016)

We've known for a while that the flora lining our guts can have pronounced effects on our health. And studies like the Human Microbiome Project are fast providing us with the data necessary to put these effects to therapeutic use. But these data attest to the fact that microbial communities are highly variable, and knowing how they interact with their human hosts is essential to the success of new therapies. Now, Amir Bashan and co-workers have come up with a way of determining whether microbial dynamics are host specific — with profound implications for the development of microbiome-based treatments.

Bashan et al. designed a computational method to detect universal dynamics in microbial data by quantifying overlap in the relative abundance of shared species and the degree to which these species' abundance profiles differ. If the dynamics are universal, as the team determined is the case for some gut and mouth microbiomes, general intervention strategies can be used. But if the dynamics are host specific, then therapies need to be tailored to the individual — designed specifically for their own microbial state as well as the dynamics of the ecosystem inside them.