At Precision Microbes, we are passionate about one very simple thing:

Making a difference.

We believe biological solutions have enormous potential in animal health, veterinary medicine, farming, equine health and companion animal health.

We also believe that the better we understand the biology, the better the decisions we can make.

That is why we are launching A Gut Feeling.

A Gut Feeling is a new education series exploring microbes, microbiomes and the biological systems connecting the gut, animals, plants, soil, people and the environment around us.

It will also give us an opportunity to explain what we do at Precision Microbes, why we do it, the research behind our products and, importantly, what we are still trying to understand.

Because we don’t have all the answers.

And that’s really the point.

Why call it A Gut Feeling?

We’ve all had one.

Butterflies before an important event.

A nervous stomach.

That unexplained sense that something feels right — or doesn’t.

For centuries we have used phrases such as gut feeling without understanding much of the biology underneath them.

Today we know that the gut and brain communicate continuously.

We know the gastrointestinal tract is a major immune organ.

We know the microbes living in and around animals interact with digestion, metabolism, the immune system and the intestinal environment.

But we’re also discovering how much we still don’t know.

The microbiome is not one simple organ or one collection of bacteria that can be divided neatly into “good” and “bad”.

It is a complex biological ecosystem.

That complexity is what fascinates us.

And A Gut Feeling is our attempt to make some of it understandable.

Starting with WHY

One question will appear again and again throughout this series:

Why?

It is easy to repeat a fact.

It is much more useful to understand the mechanism underneath it.

Take immunity.

You may have heard the frequently quoted figure that a large proportion of the body’s immune system is associated with the gut.

But the interesting question isn’t the percentage.

The interesting question is:

Why would so much immune activity be concentrated there?

Think about what happens at the gut every day.

Feed enters.

Water enters.

Environmental microbes enter.

Potential pathogens enter.

At this huge biological interface between the outside world and the animal, the body has to make thousands of decisions.

What is food?

What is harmless?

What should be tolerated?

What represents danger?

What requires an immune response?

And sitting in the middle of this extraordinary environment is the gut microbiome.

That is where A Gut Feeling begins.

More than gut health

The series will go much further than the gut.

Microbes are everywhere.

They are in soil.

Around plant roots.

On plants.

In silage.

In water.

Inside animals.

Inside humans.

In slurry and manure.

Throughout the environment in which farming takes place.

One of the concepts we will introduce through A Gut Feeling is Farm Biome.

Farm Biome is a Precision Microbes framework for looking at the farm as a connected biological ecosystem rather than a series of isolated compartments.

Soil → plant → feed and silage → animal → gut → slurry → water and environment → back to soil.

The exact biological relationships within that system are complex and the science continues to develop.

We are not claiming to have solved them.

We are asking a different question:

What happens when we start looking at the connections?

Can understanding those connections help us build farming systems that are healthier, more efficient, more robust and more resilient?

That is an area we intend to explore.

We’ll talk about our products too

Precision Microbes is a biotechnology company.

Of course our products will feature in this series.

We want people to understand what is actually inside them, how they are produced, what biological principles we are trying to work with and where we believe they can add value.

But we also want to show the evidence.

We have been carrying out research and trials across different areas of our technology, including recent independent university research that has produced very encouraging results.

As those projects are completed and the results are ready to communicate properly, we’ll bring them into A Gut Feeling.

Not simply as marketing claims.

We want to explain the question we asked, what was measured, what happened and what the result might actually mean.

And when something isn’t working as well as we’d like, we want to learn from that too.

Our products today are not necessarily the finished products of tomorrow.

Feedback from farmers, vets, researchers, horse owners and customers helps us improve them.

That’s how we think innovation should work.

Education first

There is an important principle behind A Gut Feeling.

The education should still have value even if you never buy one of our products.

If a farmer understands infection pressure better because of something we explain, that’s useful.

If a vet thinks differently about the microbiome, that’s useful.

If a horse owner better understands the relationship between diet and the hindgut, that’s useful.

If somebody starts looking at soil and sees a living microbial ecosystem rather than simply dirt, that’s useful.

And if some of those people later decide that Precision Microbes has a technology that can help them, that’s great too.

But understanding comes first.

Episode 1: Gut health and immunity

We begin with immunity.

Tommy Heffernan — Tommy the Vet — introduces a very simple way of thinking about infectious disease:

IMMUNITY ↔ INFECTION PRESSURE

When an infectious disease problem appears, we tend naturally to focus on the organism involved.

But there are two sides to the equation.

Has the animal’s ability to resist disease changed?

Has the level of infectious challenge changed?

Or have both happened together?

From there, the episode asks a deeper question about the gut.

Why is the gastrointestinal tract such an important immune organ?

What is the relationship between the gut environment, microbes and immune function?

And why might that matter when we think about animal health?

It’s one question.

But it opens the door to an enormous amount of biology.

Help us build A Gut Feeling

This isn’t intended to be a one-way lecture.

We want questions.

We want feedback.

We want farmers, vets, horse owners, researchers and people who are simply curious about the microbiome to tell us where we should go next.

Some of the science we’ll discuss is well established.

Some is emerging.

Some will challenge how we currently think.

And sometimes the correct answer will simply be:

We don’t know yet.

That’s okay.

Science isn’t weakened by questions.

It’s driven by them.

At Precision Microbes, we’re passionate about microbes, education and using biological solutions to make a meaningful difference.

We hope A Gut Feeling can make that journey useful, interesting and maybe even a little bit fun.

Welcome to the series.

Watch Episode 1: Why Gut Health Matters for Immunity.

And tell us what you’d like us to investigate next.