Posted on 11/24/2010 9:21:17 PM PST by neverdem
What can microbiologists who study human bowels learn from those who study the bowels of Earth?
Jillian Banfield trades in hell holes. In September, she could be found wading through the dark, hot, sulphurous innards of Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, California, where blue stalactites ooze the most acidic water ever discovered, with a pH of −3.6. A year before that, she was pumping up a toxic soup of uranium, arsenic, molybdenum and other metals from underneath a decommissioned nuclear-processing site in Rifle, Colorado. From both sites she took samples back to her lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where she sequenced and analysed the DNA they contain in an attempt to work out which bacteria, archaea, viruses and fungi have decided to make that particular hell their home — and what it takes to survive there.
About a year ago, Banfield added a new location to her repertoire of foul study sites: the pencil-thin intestines coiled inside premature infants weighing less than 1.5 kilograms, in the neonatal intensive care unit of the University of Chicago, Illinois. Banfield had never dealt with microbes that live in humans. But her well-regarded work on the microbial communities of Richmond Mine had attracted the attention of two medical researchers.
One was Michael Morowitz, a neonatal surgeon then at the University of Chicago, and now at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Morowitz was studying necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a potentially fatal disease that destroys the bowels of premature babies. The other was David Relman of Stanford University in California, a leader in the burgeoning field exploring the human microbiota — the vast populations of microorganisms that live in and on the human body. Morowitz and Relman asked Banfield if she could help them understand the microbial mass in this unexplored landscape...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
micro ping
One day we may even learn what vile substance inhabits Barack Obama’s cranium.
Me for a poo transplant!
But seriously, this is fascinating. I’m under the impression that this kind of work in microbial symbiosis has been done to a much greater extent in critters.
Except when antibacterial soaps are used routinely!
Antibacterials should be "Prescription Only."
However, I also thought that your immune system needs to be tried, to remain active and effective. Sorta of like exercising your muscles.
So i have come to trust my immune system, I take vitamins B, C and D specifically for the immune system benefits. I have never taken vaccines , except when I was 6 y/o and they forced polio and tetanus vaccines by government school.
I rarely get a cold, or influenza or any other kind of infectious disease.
I find this research very interesting.
However, I also thought that your immune system needs to be tried, to remain active and effective. Sorta of like exercising your muscles.
So i have come to trust my immune system, I take vitamins B, C and D specifically for the immune system benefits. I have never taken vaccines , except when I was 6 y/o and they forced polio and tetanus vaccines by government school.
I rarely get a cold, or influenza or any other kind of infectious disease.
I find this research very interesting.
Happy Thanksgiving!
.
What a vaccine does is try your immune system. Gives it a look at the virus so it can build antibodies to it. Apparently it's the additives and preservatives that cause most of the problems.
A good article that shows that changes in bacterial flora are as important as which bacteria are present at any given time.
Read through it twice.
I've had bits and pieces of this in my mind for a long time.
Your article built a coherent picture for me.
The “Human Microbiota.”
A slam dunk competitor for “Best Phrase of 2010.”
ah, food for thought as we pull up to the Thanksgiving dinner table.... we are each communities of microbes and the complexities of what will be going on in each human digestive tract today are staggering
There are several times more living organisms in one bowel movement than there are human cells in your entire body.
.....moisturizing the skin ......
There’s the money ap.
P&G will market Oil of Olay with moisturizing micro biota.
The hydrolyzing microbiots are truly natural skin moisturizers that make moisture in situ. It lasts 18 hours, yada yada, yada
Add to the list.....drink the water from sources other than plastic bottles
Cooties!!!
;-)
Thanks. Interesting.
Very interesting. Thanks for the post.
One “minor” quibble - you can’t have a negative pH.
I had the same thought. I think it was intended as a spacebar or dash, IMHO, and that it was written by a biology major if I had to guess.
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