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Biology The most amazing "space craft" ever built? Are we just a vessel for microbes?

neversickanymore

neversickanymore

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The most amazing "space craft" ever built? Are we just a vessel for microbes?

Microbes
Rods-and-cocci-with-food-particles-in-mouth.jpg


Who's running this freak show?????​


I think this subject has potential for discussion and I'd love to hear what you all think. Its really crazy complex and im just starting to wrap around this.

Here is some background info and takes to get us all primed.. I'm not endorsing all these, just laying them on the grill.
weber-smiley.gif


In 4 consideration..

Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones
You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census
Nov 30, 2007

Radio Lab: Gut Feelings

Gut Bacteria Might Guide The Workings Of Our Minds

Probiotic Bacteria Chill Out Anxious Mice

Modern Medicine May Not Be Doing Your Microbiome Any Favors (if you skipped the rest listen to this one)



I thought the references to common sexual practices and microbe transmission fascinating from the last piece.
Can finally find the reason for both sexes fascination with breasts. Sure it feels good to have ones nipples sucked, but is the underlying reason to promote microbial transfer between mother, father, and offspring.. seems more than plausible to me as nothing else makes much logical sense.

Are we just a vessel for microbes or are we in a symbiotic relationship or ? How are totally fucking up with the systemic use of antibiotics?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The nipples part.. It's more likely to do with offspring needing to suck nipples in order to survive and because they're a highly sensitive part of the human body.

It's an interesting theory, but I don't think there's much more to humans and bacteria than a very special symbiotic relationship.
 
Yeh I've had problems with my gut flora for a while, it's nothing serious like IBS or Crohn's but it still influences how I need to eat to not feel sick. I've researched my parents' health a fair bit and it turns out I basically inherited problems from both. When I am able to reign it in and keep a good balanced gut flora, it has a defining influence on my mental clarity and mood. It sucks because I love food, so on one hand I can eat whatever I want and suffer from constant fatigue, or I can live like a monk and feel good.
 
Middleway said:
Reminds me of the selfish gene theory. The idea of our internal microbes being another player in in this same game is interesting to consider

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution#Selfish-gene_theory
Click to expand...

Maybe i'm simple but I think that once you understand gene theory, you can understand almost any system :p every living organism is simply a vehicle for it's parliament of genes. The fact these genes confer physical traits that aids the organisms survival is purely so that the genes themselves may survive and propagate. Stuff happens because it can.
 
Woman becomes obese after fecal transplant from overweight donor
By Brooks Hays | Feb. 4, 2015

PROVIDENCE, R.I., Feb. 4 (UPI) -- The medical process known as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) -- often simply called a stool or fecal transplant -- has garnered quite a few headlines and accolades as a way to restore healthful gut bacteria and as a treatment for patients diagnosed with a problematic Clostridium difficile infection (CDI).
But a new case study warns that even a successful fecal transplant can have unintended and unhealthy consequences, like rapid weight gain.

According to a new report published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman who had always been of a healthy weight quickly became obese in the wake of a fecal transplant from an overweight donor.

Prior to the woman's 2011 fecal transplant, she weighed 136 pounds and registered a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 26. To treat ongoing CDI-related diarrhea problems, the woman received a fecal transplant from her overweight but healthy daughter, via colonoscopy. Sixteen months later and the woman was clinically obese, weighing 170 pounds with a BMI of 33. Her weight gain continued despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen.

"We're questioning whether there was something in the fecal transplant, whether some of those 'good' bacteria we transferred may have had an impact on her metabolism in a negative way," Dr. Colleen R. Kelly, a researcher at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a press release.

Kelly and her colleagues say there are other potential explanations for the woman's rapid weight gain. The patient was also being treated with a number of antibiotics for another gut infection (Helicobacter pylori). It's also possible the eradication of her Clostridium difficile infection encouraged her to quickly amass extra pounds.

Still, researchers say the phenomenon is unique enough to warrant extra attention and a reminder that the long-term effects of fecal transplants (an increasingly popular medical procedure) need to be studied more closely.

"Careful study of FMT will advance knowledge about safe manipulation of the gut microbiota," authors of the new study wrote. "Ultimately, of course, it is hoped that FMT studies will lead to identification of defined mixtures of beneficial bacteria that can be cultured, manufactured, and administered to improve human health."



Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015...overweight-donor/1581423067944/#ixzz3Qx5YKq3V
 
Somewhere between 50 trillion and 90 trillion cells in the human body...

Sorry how many bacteria was that again?
 
afaik we contain more bacterial cells than our own cells. so when people talk about improvements in our understanding of our genome, its pretty incrememntal compared to improvements in our understanding of our microbiomes. i'd love to be able to sequence even a tiny bit of my microbiome and track it over time.

also photo in the OP reminded me of these:

Digizyme - Knowledge Through Visual Science

www.digizyme.com www.digizyme.com

a lot of negative reporting went out about it at the time because idiots don't understand that you don't just take a picture of a cell, many different imagine modalities are used, and its all false colour, different proteins need different stains to be shown, so of course to get images like that and knitted together and thus a lot of interpretation has to be done to build up the whole.

but i loved getting to see the different components and even if they are only roughly to scale i was struck by the tininess of the ribosomes given in my head they are one of the most important parts of the cell.....
 

The origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts

Mitochondria and chloroplasts likely evolved from engulfed prokaryotes that once lived as independent organisms. At some point, a eukaryotic cell engulfed an aerobic prokaryote, which then formed an endosymbiotic relationship with the host eukaryote, gradually developing into a mitochondrion...
www.nature.com

www.genome.gov

Mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA is the small circular chromosome found inside mitochondria.
www.genome.gov www.genome.gov
 
I was gonna comment on all this but the bacteria in my gut said No.

What can I say?
The majority rules.
 
neversickanymore said:
Woman becomes obese after fecal transplant from overweight donor
By Brooks Hays | Feb. 4, 2015

PROVIDENCE, R.I., Feb. 4 (UPI) -- The medical process known as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) -- often simply called a stool or fecal transplant -- has garnered quite a few headlines and accolades as a way to restore healthful gut bacteria and as a treatment for patients diagnosed with a problematic Clostridium difficile infection (CDI).
But a new case study warns that even a successful fecal transplant can have unintended and unhealthy consequences, like rapid weight gain.

According to a new report published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman who had always been of a healthy weight quickly became obese in the wake of a fecal transplant from an overweight donor.

Prior to the woman's 2011 fecal transplant, she weighed 136 pounds and registered a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 26. To treat ongoing CDI-related diarrhea problems, the woman received a fecal transplant from her overweight but healthy daughter, via colonoscopy. Sixteen months later and the woman was clinically obese, weighing 170 pounds with a BMI of 33. Her weight gain continued despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen.

"We're questioning whether there was something in the fecal transplant, whether some of those 'good' bacteria we transferred may have had an impact on her metabolism in a negative way," Dr. Colleen R. Kelly, a researcher at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a press release.

Kelly and her colleagues say there are other potential explanations for the woman's rapid weight gain. The patient was also being treated with a number of antibiotics for another gut infection (Helicobacter pylori). It's also possible the eradication of her Clostridium difficile infection encouraged her to quickly amass extra pounds.

Still, researchers say the phenomenon is unique enough to warrant extra attention and a reminder that the long-term effects of fecal transplants (an increasingly popular medical procedure) need to be studied more closely.

"Careful study of FMT will advance knowledge about safe manipulation of the gut microbiota," authors of the new study wrote. "Ultimately, of course, it is hoped that FMT studies will lead to identification of defined mixtures of beneficial bacteria that can be cultured, manufactured, and administered to improve human health."



Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015...overweight-donor/1581423067944/#ixzz3Qx5YKq3V
Click to expand...
Wouldn’t giving a fecal transplant to promote healthy microbiome at the same time she was on “a number of antibiotics” defeat the purpose?
 
You need to kill off the microbiome first to colonize it anew, as bacteria produce a toxin-antitoxin system where a toxin is made alongside a protein that neutralizes the toxin.

The antitoxin DNA is shared around the microbiome community, giving the other bacteria resistence to the toxins made by their neighbors. This makes it so that new bacteria have a hard time colonizing.

The Sonnenberg lab at Stanford is doing a lot of cutting edge research at the intersection of microbiota, diet and gut health. If you look at the publications below, a ton of them are in really high impact journals like Science, Nature, and Cell (typically publishing in one of these once can be a career making achievement)

The Sonnenburg Lab - Publications

sonnenburglab.stanford.edu
 
It’s always blew my mind that we are pretty much made of bacteria microbes ect. A living think that makes up a living thing…but for some reason this brings me back to free will, do we have it ? Or are we just playing out something set in motion long ago, for example the Big Bang, if that is the start of our universe then we are just living in the aftershock of an explosion and technically every atom bouncing around was set in motion at the time of the explosion, crazy shit
 
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