Why You Could Be Living A Life That's Too Clean - uBiome BloguBiome Blog. Could you be healthier by being a little less hygienic? If youʼd been a patient of acclaimed 18th century English physician Dr. John Mudge and had visited him with a cough, the chances are that youʼd have found yourself sucking air into your mouth via one of his ingenious “inhalers”.
Now although I say youʼd be sucking in air, Dr. Mudge was in fact a big fan of poppyseed-derived pharmaceuticals. And his favored prescription for a cough was actually opium vapor. Today of course, youʼre more likely to use an inhaler if you suffer from asthma. Itʼs a rapidly widening condition. Asthma was already starting to become more prevalent by 1989, and it prompted an epidemiologist named Professor David Strachan at the University of London to wonder why. Finding an inverse relationship between family size and the incidence of atopic disorders (atopic disorders are allergic conditions such as asthma and hay fever) he formulated a principle he called the “Hygiene Hypothesis”. A rather awkward admission. Potential Influence of the Microbiome on Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technology. Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?
Lyte knew it was a dismissive question. And when he lost out on the grant, it confirmed to him that the scientific community was still unwilling to imagine that any part of our neural circuitry could be influenced by single-celled organisms. Lyte published his theory in Medical Hypotheses, a low-ranking journal that served as a forum for unconventional ideas. The response, predictably, was underwhelming. ‘‘I had people call me crazy,’’ he said. But by 2011 — when he published a second theory paper in Bioessays, proposing that probiotic bacteria could be tailored to treat specific psychological diseases — the scientific community had become much more receptive to the idea.
Late last year, Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology, gave a presentation at the Society for Neuroscience, ‘‘Gut Microbes and the Brain: Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience.’’ The list of potential treatments incubating in labs around the world is startling. Correction: July 12, 2015. Influence of the Microbiome on the Metabolism of Diet and Dietary Components - The Human Microbiome, Diet, and Health - NCBI Bookshelf. The Scientists Who Want to Fix America’s Guts -- Science of Us. The scientific clan bringing microbe diversity to the dinner table.
Justin and Erica Sonnenburg with their children, Claire (right) and Camille, and dog, Louis, in their home in Redwood City, California. Photographs by Cody Pickens On a Saturday evening in late March, as the sun ducked behind the ridges separating Redwood City from the Pacific, I stood on the porch of an unassuming bungalow holding a bag of my own feces. I was to be a dinner guest of Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, Stanford scientists who study the microbiota, the ecosystem of microbial organisms that live inside us and may have a role to play in preventing maladies such as obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, and diabetes.
Earlier in the day, I’d helped Justin, Erica, and their two young daughters harvest lacinato and curly kale from their front-yard-garden beds, then spread a fresh layer of turkey manure for the next round of plantings. Eating with Justin and Erica requires some intestinal fortitude. “We know,” Justin said. The Scientists Who Want to Fix America’s Guts -- Science of Us. Western lifestyle may reduce gut microbiota composition | Gut Microbiota. Several studies have linked our lifestyle to gut microbiota composition. Factors such as continuous stress, an unbalanced diet rich in fats or sedentary habits, among others, are believed to be linked to our gut’s collection of microbes. The underlying mechanisms of this, however, were not fully understood. Now, new research published in Cell Reports suggests the reason why Western lifestyle may reduce the variety of bacteria and alter the overall composition of gut microbiota is because it limits bacterial ability to be transmitted from human to human.
Led by the study’s senior author Jens Walter of the University of Alberta Department of Agricultural, Food & Nutritional Science, the researchers analysed the faeces of adults living in the US and people from rural agricultural-based Papua New Guinea, which remains one of the least urbanised countries in the world. It’s not all bad news for Western guts, however. Your Microbiome May Hold Keys To Cancer Treatment. Medscape: Medscape Access. Tracing a Path From Campylobacter to the Microbiome Eric J. Topol, MD: Hello. I'm Eric Topol, editor-in-chief of Medscape, and I am pleased to have Dr Martin Blaser join me for this One-on-One interview. Dr Blaser runs the Human Microbiome Center at New York University, and has been a leader in infectious diseases for decades. You got into this area decades ago. Martin J. Dr Topol: You were more of a traditional infectious disease specialist when you started.
Dr Blaser: Yes; clinically, I was a specialist in infectious disease, and my research was about pathogens. Dr Topol: Did you have the same experience as Barry Marshall—that no one believed any of this stuff? Dr Blaser: Some of that has been embellished over the years. Then, we and others showed that Helicobacter was important in stomach cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer death in the world.
Dr Topol: As you pointed out in our program, understanding the root cause of a pathogen can markedly change the incidence. uBiome launches world’s first dental citizen science campaign. Exciting news, just announced this morning. Please share and spread the happy word! For Immediate Release Contact: Orli Kadoch Cell: +1 415-691-7124 URL: igg.me/at/ubiomedental Email: orli@ubiome.com uBiome launches world’s first dental citizen science campaign Will study dental microbiome with UCSF expert San Francisco, California --- uBiome is launching the world’s first dental citizen science campaign two years after it made history with a record-breaking campaign to sequence the human microbiome.
Raising over $350,000 from over 2,500 participants in 2013, the biotech startup sparked the era of microbiome-based personalized medicine -- engaging with the public to provide easily accessible information about their own bodies using the latest in high-throughput DNA sequencing technology. Dr. “We are all frustrated by our inability to predict and prevent dental disease. To back the study, participate, and see more information, visit igg.me/at/ubiomedental. Microbes in the Gut Are Essential to Our Well-Being. Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of London in a letter dated September 17, 1683, describing “very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” which he had seen under a microscope in plaque scraped from his teeth.
For more than three centuries after van Leeuwenhoek's observation, the human “microbiome”—the 100 trillion or so microbes that live in various nooks and crannies of the human body—remained largely unstudied, mainly because it is not so easy to extract and culture them in a laboratory. A decade ago the advent of sequencing technologies finally opened up this microbiological frontier. The Human Microbiome Project reference database, established in 2012, revealed in unprecedented detail the diverse microbial community that inhabits our bodies. Most live in the gut. This special report on Innovations in the Microbiome, which is being published in both Scientific American and Nature, is sponsored by Nestlé. What The Bacteria In Your Gut Have To Do With Your Physical And Mental Health. Strange but true fact: Our bodies are made of more bacteria than human cells, and the gut alone contains trillions of microbes (bacteria and fungi). In fact, it's estimated that the body is composed of 10 times more bacteria than human cells.
And the intestines are home to more bacteria than any other part of the body, including the skin. Now, scientists are devoting increasing amounts of time and resources to understanding the gut 'microbiome,' as the massive collection of bacteria and microbes is called -- and the influence it may exert on the brain and body. The National Institute of Health's Human Microbiome Project, for instance, is devoting millions of research dollars to understanding the microorganisms living within the human ecosystem. A number of diseases and disorders have been linked to abnormalities or instability in gut flora, and the microbiome is an important area of research for these conditions.
Infographic by Jan Diehm for The Huffington Post. Early microbiome development impacts later weight gain. Writing in the journal mBio, the international team of researchers analysed the effect of microbiome acquisition in infants participating in the Growing Up in Singapore Toward Healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) birth cohort. Led by Dr Joanna Holbrook from A*STAR's Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), the team found that infants born by vaginal delivery at full term but after a longer duration of gestation acquired a more mature gut microbiota at a faster rate. In contrast, infants who were delivered by Caesarean section and after a shorter duration of gestation had a delay in the development of their gut microbiota.
Holbrook and her colleagues then found that infants with a mature gut bacteria profile at an early age had normal levels of body fat at the age of 18 months, while infants with less mature gut bacteria profiles tended to have lower levels of body fat at the age of 18 months - indicating that gut bacteria could be related to normal development and healthy weight gain. The Role of the Skin Microbiome in Health and Disease. Diet is the Chief Factor Behind Gut Microbiome Diversity, Study Shows IBD News Today. Gut microbiome is increasingly being recognized as a key factor in determining human health, with changes in its composition associated with a wide range of conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Notably, however, while the human gut microbiota is composed in general of approximately 70 bacterial species, there is variation among individuals. Furthermore, while the members of the gut microbiota can be stably maintained for years, the relative abundance of each member is quite dynamic.
What causes these variations between individuals and over time is incompletely understood. In this study, a research team led by Peter Turnbaugh sought to determine what drives these changes in the gut microbiota: is it our genome or our diet? Interestingly, the team also observed that when mice were re-introduced to their original diets, while the majority of their microbiome reversed, this was not the case for all members. Microbiome linked to type 1 diabetes.
Build-a-better-microbiome-7-ways-to-embrace-more-110638549923. (Photo: Getty Images) Whether we realize it or not, every one of us has an individually unique microbial eco-system in and on us, a “microbiome,” which is home to more than 100 trillion microbes. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? In fact, that outnumbers our human cells by roughly ten to one. And what are all those microbes doing inside and all over our bodies? But also present in your gut are the bad guys, who are believed to play a role in the development of inflammation, obesity and many chronic diseases — which is precisely why it’s important to your long-term health to keep gut flora, both good and bad, on an even keel. Paying Too Much on Car Insurance? 1) Attention germaphobes – step away from the hand-sanitizer These days most of us spend the majority of our lives indoors, hermetically sealed into cars, homes and offices, frequently dousing ourselves in antibacterial cleansers. 2) Bring the great outdoors in Amex Cashback Credit Card American Express Sponsored Probiotics By Dr.
Bacterial Inheritance Leads Researchers to Rethink Heredity. Tech & Science Female mice can pass down a bacterium to their offspring that causes them to have intestinal problems mimicking a genetic disease. Ho New / REUTERS A child’s genetics aren’t just a product of mom and dad’s DNA: Genes from mom’s gut microbes also play a role in how the kid turns out. Over the last decade or so it’s become increasingly clear that the microbiota—all the microorganisms that live in the gastrointestinal tract and elsewhere in the body—play a huge role in health and development. But when we speak about somebody’s genetics, we still usually mean their own DNA. It may be time to change our thinking, says Dr. Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week As Stappenbeck and co-authors have shown in a paper published this week in the journal Nature, genes from bacteria within the gut of a mother mouse can be passed to her offspring, causing them to develop digestive problems that mimic a genetic disease.
So, the scientists created two groups of the mice. You can earn $13,000 a year selling your poop. Mary Njenga processes donated fecal samples for distribution to hospitals and clinics. (OpenBiome) You can donate blood, plasma, eggs, and sperm. Why not poop? Yes, your feces are perhaps your greatest untapped monetary resource. Thanks to a nonprofit organization called OpenBiome, you can cash in to the tune of $13,000 a year -- and save lives while you're at it. Since 2013, OpenBiome has been processing and shipping loads of it all over the country. By introducing healthy fecal matter into the gut of a patient (by way of endoscopy, nasal tubes, or swallowed capsules) doctors can abolish C. difficile for good. And yes, they pay for healthy poop: $40 a sample, with a $50 bonus if you come in five days a week.
Save your stools, save the world. There's a catch: You don't just have to be healthy. "It's harder to become a donor than it is to get into MIT," joked co-founder Mark Smith (who would know, as he got his PhD in microbiology there). Who are these valiant donors, these chosen few? The Excrement Experiment.
One morning last fall, Jon Ritter, an architectural historian living in Greenwich Village, woke to find an e-mail from a neighbor, who had an unusual request. “Hi Jon, This is Tom Gravel, from Apt. 4N,” the e-mail began. “I wanted to check in and see if you may be open to helping me with a health condition.” Gravel, a project manager for a land-conservation group, explained that he had Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation of the intestinal tract along with unpredictable, often incapacitating episodes of abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. His doctor had prescribed a succession of increasingly powerful drugs, none of which had helped.
But recently Gravel had experimented with a novel therapy that, though distasteful to contemplate, seemed to relieve his symptoms: fecal transplantation, in which stool from a healthy person is transferred to the colon of someone who is sick. “I realize this is really out there,” Gravel wrote. The doorbell rang again. High-throughput discovery metabolomics. Volume 31, February 2015, Pages 73–78 Analytical Biotechnology Edited By Hadley D Sikes and Nicola Zamboni ETH Zurich, Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, Auguste-Piccard-Hof 1, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland Available online 3 September 2014 Choose an option to locate/access this article: Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Check access doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2014.08.006 Get rights and content Highlights Chromatography-based mass spectrometry (MS) allows profiling 100 samples per day.
Thousands of samples per day can be efficiently analyzed by omitting chromatography. Using flow injection, high resolution MS enable detecting thousands of m/z features. Faster throughputs are impaired by sampling and ionization techniques. Non-targeted metabolomics by mass spectrometry has established as the method of choice for investigating metabolic phenotypes in basic and applied research. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. The ecosystem within, How the microbiome contributes to endocrine Regulation.