Research · Digests
Research Digests
Each time a major batch of strain research lands in the corpus, we summarize the story it tells.
Three randomised results arrived, and none of them has been through peer review
Two are preprints and one is a doctoral thesis. Two of the three report no difference between the probiotic and the placebo. A strain page counts papers, so this is the kind of thing a count cannot show you.
Abundance moved, and four papers checked whether it mattered
Akkermansia muciniphila took 23 of this batch's 64 scored links. Five of them stop at reporting that its abundance shifted. Four went further and tested whether the organism was carrying the effect rather than just accompanying it.
Most of this batch used the strains as equipment
Three strains took 53 of the 84 scored links. Most of that work engineers them, encapsulates them, or writes standards for studying them, rather than measuring what they do in a person.
The papers only one source had
Ninety one of this batch's 266 papers came from PubMed alone. Until this week none of them could enter the index at all, and the strain that lost the most to that gap is the one this catalogue tracks most closely.
The strain being rebuilt, and the trial that found nothing
Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 is the primary subject of seven papers here, and every one studies an engineered version rather than a probiotic. The best powered human trial reported no effect.
The strain with the most new research, and the trial that found nothing
Akkermansia muciniphila drew more new papers than any other organism in the catalogue. Its best powered human trial reported no effect on the outcome it was built to measure.
The founding corpus: what the strain literature actually shows
The founding import indexed 217,246 papers across 445 strains. The finding that matters most is how little of that research has ever involved people.