June 13, 2006
More Fun With Intestinal Bacteria
It's just not possible to overstate the importance of intestinal bacteria to your well being. Part of that is simply a fine economy - why should your cells do what 3 pounds of bacteria can acomplish in your gut. The other part is that one dies without the other. Scientists have had a hard time investigating the full toxonomy of your gut flora, mainly because they don't live well outside you. But scientists have developed a way to find out what's in there, and the answer is one hell of a lot: more than 60,000 genes (or twice the human genome) and thousands of different strains of bacteria and archaea. So how did they manage to collect this treasure trove?
Rather than struggling to grow the body's myriad microbes and testing their ability to perform various biochemical reactions – the methods scientists traditionally use to classify bacteria – the team used tiny molecular probes resembling DNA Velcro to retrieve tens of thousands of snippets of bacterial DNA from smidgeons of the intestinal output of two volunteers.
I guess that means they found a way to take the DNA directly from turds without trying to grow any more. Or even worse perhaps, they inserted the probes up into the intestines themselves. Science isn't always pretty.
My problem isn't that I eat too much, it's that my gut bacteria are too efficient. Researchers (from right here in St. Louis) say that the amount of calories you actually extract from food depends on what's living in your gut. My next question would be how much of what's in you depends on what's in your parents? I can just imagine that in the future, we'll be imbibing different mixtures of gut flora to lose weight or bulk up.
And how about downing a nice mixture of whipworm eggs and gatorade? Yum, yum, but even better than the taste is that it might help people with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's. The theory is the worms give your immune system something to do and so it leave the rest of you alone. Needless to say kids, don't try this at home, wait for an FDA approved treatment.
