Drug X is a new cholesterol-lowering medication. You notice patients on drug X tend to have alterations in the compositi

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Drug X is a new cholesterol-lowering medication. You notice
patients on drug X tend to have alterations in the composition of
their microbiomes.
How would you design an ex vivo experiment to determine
whether drug X directly causes alterations in microbe abundance?
Answer in the following format (~1 sentence or so each).
Now imagine the following gnotobiotic mouse experiment. You
recruit ten people about to go on drug X and take fecal microbiome
samples from
them pre-treatment and post-treatment (a
total of 20 samples). You then use these 20 samples to colonize 20
germ-free mice. You observe that cholesterol is lower in mice who
received post-treatmentmicrobiome samples.
Combined with the result in the previous question, what
does this result suggest about how drug X works and
why?