We commend the editors of Gut for publishing the article by Hugerth et al 1 given that negative results are conspicuously missing from the microbiome literature. The paper reports that in a randomly recruited Swedish cohort of individuals meeting Rome IV criteria for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there was marked heterogeneity of the gut microbiota, but no distinct ‘signature’ was evident. However, some qualifying caveats for future research are worth highlighting. First, while the overall pool of study subjects was drawn from a large population of volunteers, the actual numbers studied by Hugerth et al 1 with respect to IBS were modest: 63 sigmoid biopsy samples from confirmed IBS cases, and 32 …

中文翻译：

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IBS 中的微生物组改变

我们赞扬 Gut 的编辑发表 Hugerth 等人 1 的文章，因为微生物组文献中明显缺少负面结果。该论文报告说，在随机招募的符合罗马 IV 肠易激综合征 (IBS) 标准的瑞典人队列中，肠道微生物群具有明显的异质性，但没有明显的“特征”。然而，未来研究的一些合格警告值得强调。首先，虽然研究对象的整体库来自大量志愿者，但 Hugerth 等人 1 研究的关于 IBS 的实际数字是适中的：来自确诊 IBS 病例的 63 个乙状结肠活检样本，以及 32 …