New Links Found Between Bacteria and Cancer

Shipud writes "A recent study by a group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that bacterial DNA gets transferred to human cells, in a process known as lateral gene transfer, or LGT. LGT is known to occur quite commonly between bacteria, including bacteria of different species. In fact, that is how antibiotic resistance is transferred so quickly. The team has shown that certain types of tumor cells acquire bacterial DNA that may play a role in tumor progression. Another group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has shown that gut inflammation leads to a radical change in the microbial population there, which encourages growth of E. coli that can disrupt the inflamed cells' DNA, leading to cancer. Both studies enable us to ask new questions such as: how does inflammation change the landscape for bacterial colonization? Can bacteria indeed harness inflammation — and then cancer — to flourish and remove competitors from their newly found ecosystem? And can we use this information to fight cancer?"

Comments

Re:So...

[Jmc23]

You do know heart disease is a relatively simple, preventable illness right? It just requires you to stop eating so much of the poisonous garbage they call 'food' in developed countries. More so in the US with it's love for chemicals.

Inflamation - What gives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any proper medical education, so can someone tell me why so much of modern medicine involves controlling or preventing inflammation? It seems to cause or contribute a lot of dangerous conditions.

What is the natural biological benefit (Why did we evolve it?) that inflammation is supposed to achieve?

Re:Inflamation - What gives?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's been a while since "Human Infectious Diseases"; but my understanding is that the inflammatory response is a component of the 'Innate immune system', a very, very, old, comparatively rudimentary; but fast-responding complement to the more recent immune system with pathogen-specific antibodies and killer T cells and things.

The inflammation itself is partially a cause of the changes that tissues undergo to do damage control and partially serves to increase supply of particular chemicals and cell types at the site of the issue(leading to the redness and swelling that are most obvious.

As for it being associated with a laundry list of unpleasant diseases, I'm told that it's a combination of:

1. Inflammation is (when it's working correctly) a stress response/damage control mechanism, that kicks in in response to certain environmental stresses and pathogens, so people who are inflamed a lot are also unpleasantly likely to be people who are being exposed to something that isn't doing them any good.

2. Like scarring, inflammation is one of those 'unpleasant; but it beat dying for most of evolutionary history' arrangements that wreaks a lot of havoc in the process of saving you from infection or tissue damage; which was a much better trade-off before we had access to modern medicine to deal with our acute illnesses and injuries; but also wanted to live to be 90.

3. The immune system, innate and acquired, is sort of your own personal military-industrial complex, and has a nasty tendency to sometimes go off the rails and start killing civilians in an increasingly paranoid response to minimal or nonexistent security threats, giving us autoimmune disorders.

Re:So...

[ScentCone]

More so in the US with it's love for chemicals.

Well at least it's not like your country, where you eat too many apostrophes and occasionally puke them out when you're ranting.

Re:lateral transfer / evolution

[similar_name]

The male isn't really transferring genes laterally though. They're being combined with the females egg and falling squarely in the realm of fertilization/reproduction. With that said. There is some evidence that there is a lateral transfer of genes between the mother and baby. Male DNA has been found in the brains of mothers' of sons. My understanding is it's harder to find evidence that the sons receive genes from the mother laterally since he will already have an X chromosome from her.

Re:So...

[Samantha Wright]

Fun science fact: it takes twice as much MSG to kill a rat than it does salt if you count by number of molecules, and 5.5x as much if you count by mass.