You Know Your Blood Type. What About Your Gut Bug Type?
by ilene - April 22nd, 2011 9:20 am
By AMIE NINH, courtesy of TIME
VERONIKA BURMEISTER VIA GETTY IMAGES
Consider this: of the trillions upon trillions of cells in the human body, only about 1 in 10 is actually human. The rest belong to microbes, which colonize every inch of you, from the inside of your mouth to the skin between your toes. It’s no wonder, then, that research is increasingly finding that the diversity of these microbes has important effects on health.
The vast majority of microbes — perhaps up to 100 trillion of them — live in our guts. So-called gut bugs help digest our food, assist our immune systems, maintain the health of the intestines, produce vitamins, aid metabolism and extract calories from food (which is why much research has associated gut bugs with obesity).
To better understand the way gut bugs work, a new study has aimed to categorize the lot of them. The study, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found that the bacteria in our guts falls into one of three distinct ecosystems, or "enterotypes."
"The three gut types can explain why the uptake of medicines and nutrients varies from person to person," Jeroen Raes, a bioinformatician at Vrije University in Brussels and coauthor of the new study, said in a statement. Which means that knowing a person’s enterotype could someday help doctors tailor drug treatments or diets to suit them better.
The New York Times reports:
Or, [Bork] speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. "You’d try to restore the type you had before," he said.
For the new study, the research team evaluated stool samples from 22 European individuals, extracted the DNA and determined its composition by using DNA analysis and computers. They also compared the results to other published findings from Japanese and American subjects.
Scientists found that each of the three enterotypes was composed of a unique balance of microbe species. The team named each type after its dominant bacteria: Bacteroides, an enterotype that’s known to break down carbohydrates and is better at making vitamins B2, B5, C and H; Prevotella, which degrades mucus and produces more B1 and folic acid; and Ruminococcus, which…
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Good News for a Change? A Newly-Discovered Species of Bacteria May Be Breaking Down Oil in Deepwater Plumes in the Gulf
by ilene - August 24th, 2010 6:20 pm
Good News for a Change? A Newly-Discovered Species of Bacteria May Be Breaking Down Oil in Deepwater Plumes in the Gulf
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
A team of scientists published a paper today in the journal Science which provides some hopeful news.
Specifically, a team of scientists have discovered a new species of oil-eating microbes which thrive in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico:
The biological effects and expected fate of the vast amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon blowout are unknown due to the depth and magnitude of this event. Here, we report that the dispersed hydrocarbon plume stimulated deep-sea indigenous
-proteobacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degraders. Hydrocarbon-degrading genes coincided with the concentration of various oil contaminants. Changes in hydrocarbon composition with distance from the source and incubation experiments with environmental isolates demonstrate faster-than-expected hydrocarbon biodegradation rates at 5°C.
Even better, the scientists believe that this new species (pronounced "gamma-proteo-bacteria") may not suck up as much oxygen as previously-discovered species:
Based on these results, the potential exists for intrinsic bioremediation of the oil plume in the deep-water column without substantial oxygen drawdown.
This discovery is especially important given that a leading expert on oil-eating microbes – Dr. David Valentine – failed to find any of the leading known oil-eating bacteria in the deepwater plumes.
As AP notes:
A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Their findings are based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2. They found that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.
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[Lead author Dr. Terry Hazen, co-director of the Earth Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories], suggested that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.
Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent while within the plume it was 59-percent.
Many well-known bacteria – such as Salmonella,…
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Scientist Creates Life. That’s a Good Thing, Right?
by ilene - May 21st, 2010 4:01 am
Scientist Creates Life. That’s a Good Thing, Right?
By Alice Park, courtesy of TIME
It’s the ultimate science experiment, really — taking a handful of chemicals, mixing them in just the right combination and presto — life!
And after nearly 15 years of such toiling in his labs in Rockville, Md., J. Craig Venter, co-mapper of the human genome, has done just that. Reporting in the journal Science, he describes a remarkable experiment in which he and the team at his eponymous institute have pieced together the entire genome of a bacterium and then inserted those genetic instructions into another bacterium. The cell booted up, and life — by nearly any definition — was created.
"We’re basically getting new life out of the computer," Venter says. "We started with a genetic code in the computer, wrote the ‘software,’ put it into the cell and transformed it biologically into a new species. We’re still stunned by it as a concept."
With Venter’s breakthrough it’s now possible to splice and snap together genetic material to create a Legoland’s worth of new genetic combinations. Ideally, some of these would have robust industrial purposes, such as manufacturing bacteria that can churn out valuable vaccine components to shorten production times during an epidemic, or co-opting organisms such as algae to pump out new sources of biofuel-based energy.
"Just imagine these cells where all we do is put in a new piece of chemical software and all the characteristics of the cell start changing to become what was dictated by the new software," says Venter. "These are biological transformers."
The paper is the final and most critical step toward realizing what began as scientific curiosity among the scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute back in the early 1990s, when many of the same researchers first succeeded in sequencing the entire genome of a self-replicating organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. That led to the generation of the complete sequencing of the smallest known genome, at 582,000 base pairs, belonging to another bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. Such smallness was intriguing because it led Venter to the philosophical question that inspired the current research — what was the minimum genome required to create life in the lab?
For the study just released, the answer turned out to be about 1 million, and the paper describes how he did it. DNA is made up of millions of…
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Bacteria, Boids and Market Instability
by ilene - August 14th, 2009 11:18 am
Here’s some weekend reading in advance. Consider throwing away economic models based on the misconception that people behave rationally and start anew with the premise that we are like mindless bacteria. – Ilene
Bacteria, Boids and Market Instability
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
The Gaps Between People
Old-time economics saw investors as rational individuals, all behaving autonomously in a logical fashion, rather like Mr. Spock umbilically attached to Deep Thought. Today not even economists really believe that this is how people actually operate, but figuring out something better is a not insignificant task. Psychologists, however, have long known that what happens in the gaps between people is as important as what happens in the gaps between their ears – so is there something going on in the interactions between investors, which causes market instability?
One possible answer comes from the study of bacteria. Just as we might have suspected all along, stockmarket investor behaviour can be modelled by examining the way a bunch of brainless, single celled and barely animate creatures interested only in food and reproduction disport themselves on a Petri plate. Sometimes analogies are just too sweet.
Investing Earthquakes
The critical thing about any economic model is that it arrives at results that look like what we actually see in markets. Mostly the jargon fixated commentators who dominate the media are happy to talk in terms of business cycles when, in reality, the only cycles seen in most investing circles are the ones used by the boys and girls delivering lunchboxes. What we actually get, if we look at stockmarkets and stock prices, is something that looks like the readout we see from a seismograph when an earthquake occurs.
If we start by making a few assumptions about what investors actually do in real life – like, for instance, that they don’t behave rationally and that they tend to copy successful behaviour from people they’re closely connected to – we can rapidly create a model that produces outputs that look very different from those generated by models of people who behave independently and rationally. In fact the output of these models looks a lot like the readout we see from a seismograph when an earthquake occurs.
So it seems that the interactions between investors and how these interactions affect their willingness or otherwise to invest is the critical thing in these models.…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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