Centering on the Gut (Biology Today) (Essay‪)‬

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. * Genomics