We've all taken and taught courses that cover the digestive system. After a while it gets to be old hat: stomach acid, peristalsis, intestinal villi, and so on. That's why I was so surprised, when going through my stack of articles, to find several that deal with the gut in very novel ways. It seems that the digestive system is hot right now and at the nexus of a number of other current topics in biology from genomics to immunology, from ecology to microbiology. Surprises like these make me want to keep teaching biology because they mean that I can never teach it the same way twice. There's always something new to enliven things.
As with many other areas of biology, digestive-system research is getting a makeover because of genomics. Obviously, knowing more about the human genome has given researchers information on the genetics of gut-related diseases like colitis and...
University of California Press