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YingCai Program: How Hot & Humid Conditions Affect Gut Bacteria

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I've always been fascinated by biology and how our environment impacts our health, so getting to lead this project was an amazing experience.

The Big Question

I wanted to figure out: Does living in a constant sauna-like environment change which bacteria thrive in your gut? And if so, does it make the bacterial community less healthy?

What I've done

This was my process from start to finish:

  • Data Detective Work: I didn't get to work in a wet lab for this one, but I became a pro at navigating online scientific databases. I found and downloaded all the raw genetic data from a previous mouse study.
  • Code Cleaning: I used bioinformatics tools (like Trimmomatic and FastQC) to clean up the data. This meant removing low-quality bits to make sure my analysis was based on really solid, reliable information. This step was tedious but so important!
  • Running the Analysis: I used a platform called QIIME2 to analyze the 16S rRNA sequences. This let me:
    • Identify all the different types of bacteria present.
    • Compare how similar or different the bacterial communities were between groups (Beta Diversity).
    • Measure the diversity within each sample (Alpha Diversity).

What I Discovered

After weeks of running analyses and creating graphs, here’s what my results showed:

FindingWhat it Means
The bacterial mix changed!By Week 8, the group in the hot/humid room had a totally different combination of gut bacteria compared to the control group. My PCoA plots showed them cleanly separating!
Some bacteria loved the heat...The amount of Firmicutes (a common phylum of bacteria) went UP in the test group.
...and some hated it.The amount of Bacteroidetes (another major phylum) went DOWN. This change became more obvious the longer the mice were exposed.
But diversity stayed strong!This was my biggest relief! The overall diversity (the number of different species and how evenly spread out they were) didn't drop. The ecosystem was different, but it was still complex and healthy.