And now we present to you... the volatilome!

Cool article in Cell Metabolism by Cell Press, "The gut microbiota shapes the human and murine breath volatilome" by a team led by Andrew Kau and Audrey Odom John. I became aware of the vast quantities of information contained in one's breath at DOC with Owlstone Medical. The current work focuses specifically on the gut microbiota. The authors show that "breath contains gut microbe-derived volatile organic compounds (VOCs) reflecting microbiota composition and metabolism." Breath VOC composition defines the volatilome. They "show that gut bacterial metabolism directly contributes to mammalian breath VOC profiles, and inform the development of non-invasive microbiome diagnostics." The study includes a proof of concept: "exhaled breath predicts the abundance of a disease-associated bacterium, Eubacterium siraeum, in children with asthma." I hope the catalog of breath VOCs associated with, or predictive of, microbiome composition grows rapidly to the point of becoming a real clinical fast diagnostics tool.