In his book, "Follow Your Gut", Dr. Rob Knight cited several examples of how your gut microbes can affect your mood, the functioning of your immune system and inflammatory diseases.  He suggests that you consult your physician or pharmacist to recommend probiotics that have randomized, placebo controlled trials backing them or failing that, you can survey the latest research published in scientific journals yourself.  

I know this is not a simple task for the regular consumer.  A master reference of probiotics that you can refer to when making decisions on what products to purchase would be a handy thing.  Dr. Knight notes in his book, that "...no patient centered resource exists that compiles this data."

If someone were to go ahead and do a google search for this information, you'd have to wade through a lot of marketing material from companies trying to sell you stuff.   By focusing on the peer reviewed scientific literature, we eliminate all the marketing material.  The research reports are then read and summarized by our scientists (curators) who put it in our reference database in a language you don't need to be an expert to undestand.

My colleague, Dr. Stephan Schurer, of the University of Miami Medical School, and I have built databases as tools for researchers to search for new drugs.  We built these by extracting & summarizing research published in scientific journals.  We propose to use a similar approach to build the probiotics reference.

The money we raise will go to purchasing subscriptions to the scientific journals (like Journal of Gastroenterology and Gut Pathology) so that we can download the relevant research articles. It also goes to pay the part time curators who will read the journals and enter the key information into the database and lastly it goes to the costs of hosting a website and licensing of necessary softwares.

Please help us in any way you can.  We greatly appreciate monetary pledges, but also we need you to tell your friends and spread the word about our project.