Microbial Media Snippets

Hello Spent Media readers!

Wow, it's July.  My apologies, I've been away for a while.  This blogger has been busy looking for a new job, an activity that turns out to be a bit of a time suck.  I'm currently bouncing back from a very nice vacation last week, visiting family and friends on the west coast and in the south.  (Yes, the avocados and biscuits were all delicious!)

I have some interesting articles from the primary literature picked out and will prepare posts for them in the near future.  For today, I've pulled together a few quick reads from the popular press regarding some topics of interest.  Not surprisingly, mainstream media sources give a lot of attention to microbes that cause disease.  For my next post, we'll return to our focus on the gut microbiota by highlighting recent research on a bug that may help fight obesity (cool, right?), so please check back soon!  

Here are the links to the articles and a quick digest of what you can find therein:

Developing New Antibiotics

(New York Times, 6/7/2013 letter to the editor, Jeffrey Stein)

In a response to the NY Times article that I highlighted in my previous post, Jeffrey Stein, the president and chief executive of Trius Therapeutics, a San Diego based biopharmaceutical company, argues that there is a lack of market incentive for new antibiotic production.

Spurious Tuberculosis Drugs Pose a Threat

(New York Times, 7/1/2013, Donald G. McNeil Jr.)

We have focused on the challenges posed by drug resistant tuberculosis in a previous post.  In this brief highlight from the NY Times, a recent PLoS Medicine report is described.  The researchers show that in poorer nations, TB drugs are often "substandard", contributing to the rise of drug resistant tuberculosis strains.  The remedy may be simple; enforce existing World Health Organization standards.

Myths And Stigma Stoke TB Epidemic in Tajikistan

(NPR, 7/2/2013, Jason Beaubien)

Not to belabor the TB theme, but here is another interesting - and unfortunately sad - story out of Tajikistan, an example of a "poorer nation" discussed in the snippet directly above.  It turns out that in addition to having only limited access to quality drugs to treat tuberculosis, there are broad societal misconceptions about how the pathogen is spread.  To add insult to injury, contracting TB is considered shameful, causing patients to lie about or hide their illness.

Obesity, cancer and bacteria in the gut: Scientists explore link

(LA Times, 6/26/2013, Eryn Brown)

This LA Times Science Now highlight reports on a study by S. Yoshimoto et. al. in the recent issue of Nature, where it is shown that obesity triggers changes in the gut microbiota that leads to the release of deoxycholic acid, a bacterial metabolite that causes DNA damage.  The researchers believe that this points to a link between obesity and an increased risk of developing liver cancer (via a small molecule signaling mechanism).

Antibiotics in infancy linked to eczema

(Chicago Tribune, 7/3/2013 , Kathryn Doyle; Reuters)

 

A new study shows that exposure to antibiotics during the first year of life increases the risk of the allergic skin disease eczema.  The researchers suggest that this reveals a link between the resident microbes in babies, the developing immune system, and autoimmune diseases.  Alternately, there was no link found between prenatal antibiotic exposure and increased eczema risk.

Scientists Discover Thriving Colonies of Microbes in Ocean 'Plastisphere'

(ScienceDaily, 6/27/2013)

This is a fascinating one!  So, it should surprise no one that plastics, completely man-made chemicals, are pollutants in our waterways and marine ecosystems.  Tiny particles of plastic are now creating a unique environment in the Earth's oceans, referred to as the "plastisphere".  Yes, this is a bit sad and troubling, for sure.  But, this ScienceDaily post reports on a recent article in the journal Environmental Science & Toxicology by E. Zettler et. al., where the authors have found completely unique populations of microbes living in and adapting to the "plastisphere" environment.  Electron microscopy analysis of some of the plastic particles revealed pits and imperfections on the plastic surface, indicating microbial processing of the polymer.  The authors certainly did not fail to point out that it would be cool to tap the plastisphere to discover hydrocarbon and plastic degrading microbes that could be used to clean up polluted environments!  (Lemons into lemonade I suppose?)

Happy reading and Happy 4th of July!

- @EJDimise

New and Not-So-New Media Highlights

I'd like to recommend two interesting articles for your consideration and reading enjoyment.

Policies to Find New Drugs for Bad Bugs

The first is an article from the June 2nd New York Times titled, "Pressure Grows to Create Drugs for 'Superbugs'" by Barry Meier.  It highlights the growing urgency for the discovery and development of new antibiotics to treat drug resistant bacteria, a topic we've discussed here before.  Potential legislation, FDA rule changes, and new government subsidies for big pharma companies (GlaxoSmithKline is mentioned as an example where this is already in the works) are all floated as ways to streamline and incentivize the discovery, production, and marketing process for new drugs.  Here are a few snippets:

"The need for new antibiotics is so urgent, supporters of an overhaul say, that lengthy studies involving hundreds or thousands of patients should be waived in favor of directly testing such drugs in very sick patients"

"The overuse of antibiotics in people and animals, often for conditions for which the drugs are ineffective or not needed, is seen as a driving force in the development of resistant bacteria.  As these organisms have evolved and developed resistance, the development of new drugs has not kept pace."

Our Bugs, Ourselves - Current and Future State of the Human Microbiota

The second article is from the March 2013 issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology, which I somehow managed to miss until just a few days ago (my bad).  In a Perspectives piece titled, "The microbiome explored: recent insights and future challenges" - FYI this is not open access, so my apologies to those without full-text journal access - the journal interviews 5 prominent figures in the field regarding the current state and future directions of human microbiome/microbiota research.  We've touched on this subject several times here at Spent Media!  To give you a taste for the content of the discussion, here are some words from each of the featured scientists:

"The most important findings [regarding the human microbiota] to date are: the notion that we as humans are a superorganism, with our biology determined by the genes encoded in our DNA together with the genes of our microbial partners"

"... the current regulatory environment conspires against large-scale trials of prebiotics and probiotics for therapeutic purposes, and a more enlightened regulatory approach is necessary..."

- Dr. Claire Fraser, University of Maryland School of Medicince

"A very surprising finding has been that disruption of the homeostasis between the microbiota and the host, known as dysbiosis, has a more important role than host genetics in the development of a range of diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes."

- Dr. Jun Wang, Beijing Genomics Institute

"The human metagenome is orders of magnitude more manipulable than the human genome.  This difference provides the opportunities to intercede to prevent and treat illness, if only we knew what was important!  The use of faecal transplantation to treat colitis caused by Clostridium difficile seems to have at least some definite efficacy."

- Dr. Martin Blaser, New York University School of Medicine

"For formula-based nutrition supplements, we need to know more than simply the species composition of microbial communities; we need to understand how the communities function as ecosystems."

- Dr. Peer Bork, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany

"... characterizing the microbiota of divergent populations, including geographically and culturally isolated populations before they adopt elements of the Western lifestyle, may be crucial for understanding the suite of so-called Western diseases..."

"... we really lack the ecological and mechanistic understanding of the parameters that control composition and change in the microbiota to make it do our bidding."

- Dr. Rob Knight, University of Colorado at Boulder

[Notice the emphasis - again and again - on needing to gain a more complete understanding of our microbiota as an interconnected, complicated community functioning within a self-contained ecosystem - you.]

Happy reading!

- @EJDimise   

You and 100 Trillion of Your Best Friends

"... we would do well to begin regarding the 
human body as 'an elaborate vessel optimized 
for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.'"
- Dr. Justin Sonnenburg (Stanford Microbiology) quoted
in "Some of My Best Friends Are Germs" by Michael Pollan
of the New York Times 

    Has it come to your attention lately that you aren't pooping on a regular enough or comfortable enough basis?  Has Jamie Lee Curtis convinced you that the answers to all of your problems can be found in a cup of Activia yogurt?  What, not crazy about eating yogurt multiple times a day?  Maybe you need to swallow some Phillips' Colon Health, Bayer's somewhat expensive offering; no yogurt, just pop a pill!  These and other products promise to deliver "probiotics" that will tend to your less than perfect defecation situation.  Sounds good, right?  Take this stuff with your vitamins in the morning and it will straighten you out.  But what is the it that is doing the straightening?  Thanks to the New York Times Sunday Magazine this last weekend, you can learn all about it in one easily digestible article.  And that's great, because it has had the attention of the scientific community for a while now, and it's only becoming a hotter and hotter topic.

    In, "Some of My Best Friends Are Germs", Michael Pollan provides a great survey of the current state of research into the human microbiota - the trillions upon trillions of bacteria that live on you and in you - all the time.  But wait, aren't bacteria bad?  Don't they cause illness?  Aren't they to be feared and fought off with soaps, sanitizers, cleaning sprays, and antibiotics?  The answer is yes, but only sometimes, and just the troublemakers (read: pathogens - the disease causers).  It's true, whether you like it or not, you always have been, and always will be, populated by microbes, head to toe, inside and out.  And that's a good thing!  Your resident microbes help you digest food, they help keep your immune system up to snuff, and they help out-compete the disease causing bugs when they try to take over the turf of our friendly cohabitants.  The way research is moving, there's likely a study linking your microbial friends to the most mundane bodily functions.

"SYMBIOSIS - any close physical association between two

organisms, usually from different species.  This includes

mutualism, commensalism and parasitism.  The term originates

from the Greek words syn (together) and bio (life)."

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Felix Sommer & Fredrik Backhed,

2013, Vol. 11, 227-238.

     In this great piece by Pollan, we see the popular press providing an in depth look at the many aspects of health and modern research that is dedicated to understanding the bacterial symbionts that we live with.  In fact, in the scientific community, it is becoming less chic and more mundane to view the human body as an ecosystem unto itself - a veritable superorganism - composed of our human cells and no less than 10X that number in bacterial cells, representing many hundreds of different species.  Their presence can be weighed, literally, in pounds.  (Trying to shed some weight?  Sorry to say, but several of those pounds don't even belong to you.)  Hence, the title of this post.  You literally have 100 trillion "other", non-human, cells living in and on you.  And why not?  You're a great place to live.  Your exposed surfaces, inside and out, provide so many different habitats to adapt to.  Your immune system keeps the trouble makers at bay.  You provide food and water multiple times a day.  You are very efficient at delivering oxygen, at least to those bugs that bother to breath it in the first place.  For those that don't - and, by the way, most of your symbionts don't - most of your digestive tract is really great at keeping that poisonous gas far far away (yeah, oxygen is actually poisonous to them). 

    Symbiosis is at the center of this story.  Life often works better when different species live and interact with one another.  Our commensal bacteria - the ones that have something to gain from us, but we could care less about them - are often written off as "along for the ride".  This may be so, but the more we learn, the more difficult it is likely to become to draw the line between these free-riders and our bona fide mutualists - we provide a benefit for them and they return the favor.  These are the probiotics we hear so much about in TV commercials (though there are many many more that aren't included in your probiotic pills!).  Your body gives them food and shelter, and they make sure you poop on time and that the experience is as good as it can be.  Most of the time when we think about microbes, we think about the ones that cause disease - the pathogens - but they comprise a small yet horribly troublesome minority.  So when you think about you and your 100 trillion little friends, there's no need to be grossed out.  They need you and you need them.  Anyway, it's how life works, and there's no amount of Purell or penicillin that can change it.

We'll talk more about this soon,
- @EJDimise