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Every Man Is an Island (of Bacteria)
Shipud writes "There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells. Most of them are located in our guts, and they affect our well-being in many ways. A group at Washington University has recently reported that although our gut microbes perform similar functions, it appears that different people have completely different compositions of gut bacteria: every man is an island, a unique microbial ecosystem composed of completely different species. One conclusion is that the whole division of bacteria into species may well be over-used in biomedicine."
overrated? That doesn't even make sense. Even if the features of most colonies bacteria are completely unique, that would only indicate a requirement even deeper seperation by individual feature. (i.e. metabolization of a particular substance into sugar by using a particular amino acid reaction)
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Common knowledge you can find in most microbiology or immunology textbooks.
I've heard it speculated that this could be one of the causes of Crohn's Disease and Colitis. Can anyone here comment on this?
...I can claim my ass as a dependent?
Somehow my body weighs 80kg and yet the 10x as many cells of bacteria only weigh 1.5kg?
Sounds like bullcrap to me.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Agreed but only under the condition that I can't read the article because it's been slashdotted.
Anyway, different pathogenic bacteria have certain antibacterial medicines that they're susceptible to and others that their not. Ergo, division of bacteria into separate species is not overused but necessary.
Admittedly this comment is only half-relevant, but I thought it would be informative for people to read about the many and varied praises heaped on Saccharomyces Boulardii, a tropical yeast which seems to have wonderful effects on gut flora.
This probiotic appears to be (gradually) gaining recognition in the mainstream medical community.
That could explain why they're vitamin deficient...
I already learned this from an episode of House last year.
Isn't it lonely?
I can't believe the summary got "affect" vs. "effect" right, and "than" vs. "then" correct, but whiffed on "our" vs. "are." That's a new one for me.
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
Well, Im a user here, but im going anony because of my topic.
Every man is an island: Bacteria.
I could tell. How? Every person has a certain scent profile about them, even if they cannot smell it most of the time. I know mine when I work outside on a hot day. Some people at work also sometimes have a pronounced smell.. Perhaps its pheromones or something, I dont know. My GF also has one (and no, I dont mean vaginal smell). Like I said, this is one of the reasons why Im being a coward.
Now, why do I know? I had a diarrhea about 2.5 months ago, from being food-poisoned at our local Subway (friend at same, same sickness, assumed food). Standard food poison is vomiting and diarrhea, neither are which are fun in the least. Along with that are heavy sweats. However, I smelled something weird: when I went to #2, I smelled an acrid smell of the faint "pheromone" I normally smell.. It was like whatever bad food I had was killing off all my good bacteria, and I was smelling it.
So yes, I can understand Island of bacteria comment. I could also see linking the specific bacteria to weight gain/loss, BO factor, and other things. It would be neat to see a culture test of healthiness based upon non-self cultures, and perhaps inoculate yourself with other bacteria to aid in true digestion.
Back in the 80's in OMNI, there was a toothpaste on the market for about 1 month before being pulled, that had a plaque bacteria that could not digest teeth (made no cavities). Of course, gross factor was high and was summarily pulled from market...Perhaps they were right, just 20 years too early.
No bacterium is an island, entire of itself; every bacterium is a piece of the intestine, a part of the main. If a Lactobacillus be washed away by the sea, the colon is the less, as well as if an Escherichia were, as well as if a colony of thy friend's or of thine own were: any bacterium's death diminishes me, because I am involved in the gut biota, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I'll have to remember that next time I get pulled over for driving "alone" in the high-occupancy vehicle lane.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Was just wondering about this myself... cells are big factories that carry out specialized tasks on a large scale, and contain a copy of the DNA for the entire body. (short of RBC's) Bacteria only need to contain one small set of mechanics for their own life, they're not performing a function for the body and so can be much smaller. All bacteria do is eat and divide.
You've got a box of BBs, and I've got a box the same size, of bowling balls. Of course you have "more" of them. Same box though.
The summary needs to clarify between quantity and volume/mass.
Somehow reminds me of the famous comment, "over 45% of students scored below average on this test!" no, really? learn your maths.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So, is it possible to uniquely identify someone say by their shit?
Living in Chile
Agreed but only under the condition that I can't read the article because it's been slashdotted.
Anyway, different pathogenic bacteria have certain antibacterial medicines that they're susceptible to and others that their not. Ergo, division of bacteria into separate species is not overused but necessary.
Actually, with the abundant transfer of both virulence and drug resistance, more bugs that were previously non-virulent and / or not drug resistant are getting those traits. Therefore, for medicine, functional assays are more useful than phylotyping (determining species composition). Also, RTFA (not slashdotted, just read it myself). TFA talks about the bacterial ecosystem that affects body weight, not about pathogens.
I'm offended. Sex with ducks is NEVER redundant. What are you implying, mods?!?
I heard a piece about this on NPR about a month ago. What I found very interesting was that the bacteria help you to digest foods, so one person's personal bacteria may allow her to receive more energy from say a piece of pizza than another person with different bacteria. Also very interesting was that by traveling and eating food from different regions you can pick up different bacteria and possibly gain even more energy from the foods you eat.
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
In terms of the animal kingdom, the concept of 'species' may easily be understood in terms of the concept of breeding. When two organisms cannot produce fertile offspring, they are separate species. This is a well defined barrier. A population does not become a new species overnight.
In terms of bacteria, they can become what might be termed a new species overnight. In the case of this article, they're noting that though the bacteria may be dissimilar at a genetic level, at a morphological level they are essentially the same, hence the question of the value of the species idea. We all have different species of bacteria living inside of us, but they all do the same basic things.
....with a nice alternative to fingerprints....
bickerdyke
"division of bacteria into separate species is not overused but necessary"
We are effectively living symbiotically with some of these other bacteria. But then again, ever since our ancestors became multicellular organisms, each of the organism's own cells were living symbiotically with each other.
body!
My initial reaction to your post was that that was the moderation you hoped for.
Every man is an island
and obviously, the summary was written in the 40s, before feminist criticism of language became familiar to the mainstream.
This would explain why i fart so much.
This is an incredible oversimplification, especially when you realise that asexual reproduction is very common in the animal kingdom. The idea you quote is often cited but is, in itself, an insufficient criterion. For example, there are organisms which can interbreed and can produce fertile offspring that are clearly considered separate species by any objective measure. In many species, lots of individuals are incapable of interbreeding with lots of individuals of the same species. Interbreeding is a complex thing that synthesises anatomical, behavioural, geographical and genetic components. A failure in any of these can cause a failure to interbreed which does not necessarily equate to a different species. There are also complexes of closely related species that interbreed frequently and produce fertile offspring but they are still distinct species.
In any case, TFA is about bacteria and not animals. The principle of using inability to interbreed as a definition of species in animals is even more removed from reality in bacteria which often share genetic material across species, even species that are not closely related.
Finally, the postulate that two creatures that are functionally similar within a diverse community, despite genetic dissimilarity, might not be considered different species is simply ludicrous. For example, in fish community assemblages, there are normally planktivores and piscivores. From a broad community perspective, the top-level piscivores all perform precisely the same function. No one, however, would argue that that makes them the same species. By way of illustration, the lake trout in a salmonid/coregonid community fulfills the same functional role as the northern pike in an esocid/coregonid community. That doesn't make lake trout and northern pike the same species.
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
sex with ducks
Is that some kind of crude attempt at a duck-roll?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus...[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies)
What does it even mean to break bacteria up into species? They don't reproduce sexually. They take up new genetic material from their environment. It's a bit of a misnomer.
In a way this validates some claims by my ex wife in regards to my personal hygiene.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
My girlfriend is into anal stuff, and I've noticed that since doing some things with her that would get some of her gut bacteria into my body my digestion has changed. And no, I have not changed anything about my diet. I think her gut bacteria has colonized me.
You say that like it matters.... ?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
from the actual abstract written by the scientists: ..level. ...[changes]. These results demonstrate that a diversity of organismal assemblages can nonetheless yield a core microbiome at a functional level, and that deviations from this core are associated with different physiological states (obese compared with lean).
each person's gut microbial community varies in the [species present]..... However, there was a wide array of shared microbial genes among sampled individuals, comprising an extensive, identifiable 'core microbiome' at the gene, rather than at the organismal
Obesity is associated with
Part one means that althought the bacterial species present vary, the functional capacity of all the bacteria, put together is similar - if you compare hertz and avis, they have different numbers of different models, but the function - give renters a car - is similar.
The second part say that there are specific changes associated with obesity; it does not say if this is a cause [changes in bacteria change digestion leading to obesity] or an effect [overeating changes your gut ]
I'm off to get a patent for Authentication Based on Gut Bacteria Composition.
They're jazzercising Fry's muscles!
What?
That's just sophistry. Every animal is "physiologically perfect?" Only if your definition of perfect is meaningless...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
About 3 years ago, I had a terrible meal. Cheeseburger with broiled spinach topping.
That's not the gross part.
I had the diarrhea as I have never had before. It took more than a week for me to keep anything from going through me in an hour or less. But let's not make this alt.gross...
Before that, I had no serious digestive problems. Never constipation for more than a day, nothing to complain about. My wife hated that, she has her issues.
Since then, however, my digestion is different. In almost every way. Some foods just don't work for me any more, the toilet is no longer my friend, and it's just very different.
I have no doubt that 'cleansing' incident sure cleaned me out. My doctor was curious about how I could drink a quart of water and have go straight through me. He let up when I could take broth and didn't show serious signs of dehydration. Drinking 12 quarts of water and broth a day helped... Ugh.
When I could actually keep my bowels for a half a day, my wife started me on a little bit of yogurt to give my gut something to work with. It sure did. I went from 235 to 210 that week. I would not recommend that as a weight-loss regimen...
I've got a different gut biota now. If it can change, it can be different.
No, I haven't been back to that restaraunt. I haven't even been back to that strip mall.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Um, no, it is not. One simple initial example to get the ball running: there are hybrids where the males are sterile, but the females are fecund; for example, hybrids of domestic cats with the African serval (the resulting hybrid is called a Savannah cat). Since a housecat and a serval can produce fertile offspring, your test fails to establish them as separate species. (Note that I was careful not to say that the fertile offspring proves that they are the same species, "If A then B" doesn't entail "If B, then A.")
Now, you may be thinking of ways of strengthening your definition against examples like this one, but that was only the starting point. The broader problem is that as you try to come up with more and more precise definitions of "species," all you will do is set yourself up for ever more elaborate examples of intermediate cases that either pose a problem for your definition, or just suggest that your definition makes arbitrary, unprincipled decisions about where the line should lie. (E.g., what if there are two types of organisms that produce infertile offspring 25% of the time? 12.5%? 7.25%? How low must the percentage get to prove a species barrier? Must that number be the same for every pair of organisms, or does it make sense to measure it differently for different pairs because of some fact about genetics? What about pairs of organisms that would produce fertile offspring often enough, but are reproductively isolated by geographical boundaries? Etc.)
The deeper point is that evolution doesn't care about "species"; it cares about populations whose members interbreed, and in the real world, such populations may easily have very vague boundaries, because "X can breed with Y" isn't a yes/no matter.
Are you adequate?
sex with ducks
Sex with a duck is not masturbation!
If the ratio of loose bacteria to organised tissue in our bodies is so high, does this mean that we could someday expect targeted antibiotics for weight loss?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Every man is an island, and an island never cries
One conclusion is that the whole division of bacteria into species may well be over-used in biomedicine.
Dear Slashdot,
Please use one of my mod points for today to mod the species taxonomy thingy +1 Insightful.
Thank you.
I wonder how long it'll be before somebody cracks on commercializing the idea of transferring "weight loss bacteria" from skinny people who seem to be able to process transfats and high fructose corn syrup without ever gaining weight, to fat people who bloat up from the mere smell of cabbage, in the convenient form of a capsule at premium cost.
Don't kiss the fat chicks, or you'll catch their fat germs.
---- death to all fanatics
A couple years ago I got very, very sick--nastiness coming out of both ends to the point of hospitalization for dehydration. It took a week for my abdominal muscles to get over the soreness from the heaving. Before that sickness, I had a very tolerant digestive system--spicy, rich, or strange foods did not bother me at all. Since the sickness, certain foods upset my digestive system, causing gas, bloating, etc. And it's weirdly specific--I used to love Progresso canned soup, but since the sickness any Progresso soup with chicken in it gives me terrible gas.
This article is really interesting because I was just speculating the other day with my wife about this--that maybe my sickness cleaned out my GI system so thoroughly that I've lost certain gut bacteria that I had collected over the course of my life, and thus I'm not able to digest certain foods as easily as I once could.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1106471&cid=26635287
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Something doesn't make sense:
There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells. Most of them are located in our guts
That means that over 50% of 90% of our body mass in in our guts? Well, the researchers are Americans...
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Something doesn't make sense:
There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells. Most of them are located in our guts
That means that over 50% of 90% of our body mass in in our guts? Well, the researchers are Americans...
It's because microbial cells are much smaller then eukaryote cells. Imagine a bunch of basket balls surrounded by BBs.
By mass its probably about two pounds.
I'm just full of sh!t. With some microbes in it.
Of course not. With ducks you have someone to talk to.
This is a very sexist study to talk about only man's guts!
Bacteria, humans are simply methods by which genes replicate.
Deleted
I think it makes perfect sense for two reasons.
One, my impression has always been that noting species is about aggregation, not division--that these specific organisms were all in one class even though they had superficially different species.
Two, say you are able to further separate them based on features but you get some absurdly high number of "species." What does this do for you, exactly? The idea of "species" is a useful tool, but I think when there are a trillion trillion species each with one member in it you haven't done anything especially "useful."
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probiotic
Deleted
It's because microbial cells are much smaller then eukaryote cells. Imagine a bunch of basket balls surrounded by BBs.
By mass its probably about two pounds.
I see, thanks. I didn't even think of that possibility.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Maybe it's because I have BSc in microbiology, but is this really news?
In terms of the animal kingdom, the concept of 'species' may easily be understood in terms of the concept of breeding. When two organisms cannot produce fertile offspring, they are separate species. This is a well defined barrier. A population does not become a new species overnight.
How do Ring Species fit into your understanding of the barriers between species?
872835240
Whoever they are today.
... I just have more aggressive bacteria in my gut.
I love you.
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
This struck me as curious as well.
Some have noted that the relative size between human and bacterial cells is different. That makes sense. But still. . ! My first impulse was to look at my body and think, "So my torso, legs, arms, head. . , only 1/10th of that is human? Sure. Pull the other one. Be careful though, according to this article it might come off in your hands like a zombie limb!"
About 10 seconds of Googling informed me that estimates of the number of cells in a human body range all the way from 10 trillion to 100 trillion, (10 to the 14 power), which is on par with the bacteria count noted in the article.
And if that's the case, then it should probably be assumed that the estimates for bacteria count are probably not a chipped in stone thing either, and may indeed be much lower.
So it sounds like a bit of editorial license was being taken in order to punch up the story.
Though, the fact that they're even in the same ball park did take me aback. Hence the term, "Punch Up".
-FL
Try one of the better probiotic supplements. Align is the one doctors usually recommend, if they've heard about probiotics at all, but Jigsaw's is more complete. The probiotics sold at most chain stores are worthless.
Go easy on wheat and dairy. Gluten and casein (wheat and dairy proteins) are very hard to digest. Digestive enzyme supplements can help.
Go easy on refined sugar. That feeds all sorts of bad things. Fake sugar (Aspartame) is bad too. Forget about soft drinks.
Steel cut oats help.
Isn't it nice that now Mr Bush has gone we can talk about evolution again?
Seems that even Texas thought the bloke was a loony.
More likely evolution cares about allele frequency and genotype. Which results in phenotype, which gives rise to the outward appearance; what we like to call a 'species'.
It's an allele's contribution to overall fitness of its carrier that produces the myriad changes in populations that we understand as speciation.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
bacteria are a thousand times smaller in volume
And by volume it's about 3 grams.
As we get more into studying real bacterial and archaeal populations rather than just what we grow on Petri dishes (i.e. metagenomics), the label of "species" is being replaced with "operational taxonomic unit" because of the tremendous flexibility of these microorganisms to gain, lose and transfer genetic material under selective pressure.
I was at a talk a few months ago, and the speaker showed how an E. coli culture was subjected to a toxin, and some cells proliferated because they randomly lost 30% of their genome while replicating: nothing critical for survival, but critical to not being affected by the toxin. This was over the course of a day.
Howard is that you?
... seems to be about the same problem for Biologists that defining what a planet is for Astronomers.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
1) Collecting gut microbes from Olympic athletes (or regional super star(s))
...
2) Grow large colonies of said microbes
3) Brand, market, advertise - shouldn't have a problem with the FDA since 'probiotics' are ok; or label as a natural supplement.
4) ??? (actually do the above steps and then manage to sell the product)
5) profit
packaging ideas;
* 2007 NBA Champion Spurs "gut microbe collection" (includes starting line up, benchwarmers included if you call in the next 5 minutes)
* 2008 Olymics USA Womens 4*400 metre relay "power probiotic pack"
*
My personal favorite are Ring Species. That'll mess with your mind!
Is that like "geominerology"?
(Not quite as bizarre as seeing "biogenetic plague" in a science fiction show once, though. "Is that like 'geo-petrified fossil'?"...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells.
This would mean that I could lose 90% of my weight by taking a modern broadband antibiotica, and taking a giant piss/dump.
Yeah. Right...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
overrated? That doesn't even make sense. Even if the features of most colonies bacteria are completely unique, that would only indicate a requirement even deeper seperation by individual feature. (i.e. metabolization of a particular substance into sugar by using a particular amino acid reaction)
I thought the point to that statement was that, when *different* collections of bacteria perform *the same* functions in different people, the statement that "Lactobacillus Reuteri GG plays the role of..." may not be all that useful scientifically.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
...and especially don't eat their shit! Note - some store bought Probiotics are made from fecal matter, so this is a possibility.
Not too strange. The only thing I find strange is the name is a misnomer. The ring is broken.
I'll elude to the true cause of Chron's disease in a few sentences as followed here. Notice how all the people with Chron's disease are either homosexual/bisexual men and heterosexual women. Notice how all the people with Chron's disease are physically attractive in their own physical fitness, as you never see a "fat" one. Notice how all the people with Chron's disease are "picky" on what foods they eat.
Their diet for food by impulse, as well as their acceptance of anal sexual intercourse weak,ens their body in such a way and introduces unusual stimulus and bacteria into their digestive tract; while they are in a euphoric state of malnutrition, foreign biological agents interact with their body through the digestive tract and form a tolerance with the weakened immune system not fully rejecting it.
And there you have it. I suggest you all eschew Calista Flockheart, the Mary-Kate and Ashley, Fiona Apple, Edward Norton, and Trevor (Alden "Peter North" Brown) Baum (wtf is that fagname for real?).
Here's one crucial thing that sums up my point: allele frequency can only be defined relative to a population, but population boundaries are vague.
Are you adequate?
There are also complexes of closely related species that interbreed frequently and produce fertile offspring but they are still distinct species.
If they interbreed frequently and produce fertile offspring, how do they not over time end up merging into a single species? I thought this was the whole point of the above definition of species.
Could you give an example of (sexually reproducing) species which frequently interbreed yet remain separate?
Is there some reason to prefer that family of probiotics to the various Lactobacillus and other things found in yogurt, etc.?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are a variety of examples but I'll quote only a couple and leave others to the reader.
The northern redbelly dace, Phoxinus eos (Cope 1861), and the finescale dace, Phoxinus neogaeus Cope 1867, are two cyprinid fishes native to North America that are known to exist in stable assemblages with their hybrids. Such assemblages are composed frequently of both diploid and polyploid members and may be supported at least partly by gynogenesis. A number of genetic and other studies exist, some of which can be found through a Google search. This is a particularly fascinating example since it points out how narrow our focus is if we fail to account for asexual reproductive possibilities.
A second simple example is what some researchers have begun to call the Canis (wolf) complex, all the members of which appear to be able to interbreed and to produce fertile offspring. Nowak (1992), among others, has suggested that the red wolf, Canis lupus rufus appears to be on the verge of being subsumed into the coyote Canis latrans genome but he feels that this interbreeding has largely occured over the last century or so and that, prior, they were entirely distinct genotypes separated geographically by differing habitat dependencies.
Finally, I'd raise the example of the lake trout, Salvelinus namaycush (Walbaum in Artedi 1792) and the brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis (Mitchill 1814), two species of salmonid fishes which are known to produce fertile hybrid offspring through artificial propagation but appear to be largely prevented from hybridising more than very infrequently by behavioural separation, even where the species exist sympatrically.
Now, it's true that these sorts of closely-related species can cause us to examine how it is we define species. Who knows, perhaps one day we'll arrive at the point where we classify all of the canids as a single species, for example. We're certainly not at that point right now, though, and most wolf researchers would suggest that it's unlikely that that will be the outcome.
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.