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by
Ed Yong
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January 3 - October 19, 2017
There are viruses too, in unfathomable numbers – a “virome” that infects all the other microbes and occasionally the host’s cells.
But if our own cells were to mysteriously disappear, they would perhaps be detectable as a ghostly microbial shimmer, outlining a now-vanished animal core.2
See also famous quote about nematodes
When Orson Welles said “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone”, he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone.
we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome. This is a pleasant fiction.
“Animals might be evolution’s icing, but bacteria are really the cake.”
The latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones
There are fewer than 100 species of bacteria that cause infectious diseases in humans;
Your cells carry between 20,000 and 25,000 genes, but it is estimated that the microbes inside you wield around 500 times more.
They are such an inevitable presence that we have outsourced surprising aspects of our lives to them. They guide the construction of our bodies,
They educate our immune system,
They affect the development of the ne...
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We’ll look at how we inadvertently disrupt these partnerships and, in doing so, jeopardise our health. We’ll see how we might reverse these problems by manipulating the microbiome for our benefit.
Some nematode worms
burrow into plant cells, and cause vast agricultural losses, using genes stolen from microbes.
It is easiest to appreciate how important these partnerships are by considering what would happen if they broke.
without microbes to provide plants with nitrogen, the Earth would experience a catastrophic de-greening.
Darwin certainly collected microbes – he called them “infusoria”
Some species are common, but none is everywhere. If there is a core, it exists at the level of functions, not organisms.
The variations that exist between body parts dwarf those that exist between people.
the dawning realisation that microbes matter enormously to us – especially in a medical setting.
Many conditions, including obesity, asthma, colon cancer, diabetes, and autism, are accompanied by changes in the microbiome, suggesting that these microbes are at the very least a sign of illness, and at most a cause of it.
says biologist Margaret McFall-Ngai.
In my mind, this is the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin.”
“It’s pretty speculative but the idea is that you might have microbial pre-adaptations to get the energy you need to do some of those more exotic things,”
ant-eating mammals, including pangolins, armadillos, anteaters, aardvarks, and aardwolves (a type of hyena), all have similar gut microbes, even though they have been evolving independently for around 100 million years.
These are health problems re-envisioned as ecological ones, where no single microbe is at fault, yet an entire community has shifted into an unhealthy state. They are cases of symbiosis gone wrong.
When a langur or human gets sick, its problems are akin to a lake that’s smothered by algae or a meadow that’s overrun with weeds – ecosystems gone awry.
No matter how we squint at the problem, it is clear that microbes subvert our notions of individuality.
Perhaps it is less that I contain multitudes and more that I am multitudes.
David Relman once noted that “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control’” are all potential signs of mental illness.26 “Small wonder that recent studies of symbiosis have engendered substantial interest and attention,”.
We are social creatures and seek to understand our connections to other living entities. Symbioses are the ultimate examples of success through collaboration and the powerful benefits of intimate relationships.”
Because we share a common ancestor.
We store information in DNA using the same coding scheme. We use a molecule called ATP as a currency of energy. The same is true across all life.
What on earth possessed this man to scrutinise rain that had collected in a pot? A similar question could be asked of many people throughout the entire history of microbiome research: they were the ones who thought to
Because we look where we hurt, or where we think the hurt is coming from.
Pasteur showed otherwise in 1865, when he discovered that two conditions afflicting France’s silkworms were caused by microbes. By isolating infected eggs, he stopped the illnesses from spreading and saved the silk industry.
One of medicine's greatest moments in the service of industry, not human health
The narrative of disease and death still dominates our view of microbiology.
Actually it goes back much further, to nematologist Nathan Cobb, who wrote "In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites."
