90% OF YOUR BODY ISN’T YOU!
MICROBIOME -- JO HANDELSMAN
Our bodies are not ourselves. Our bodies are not ours. Rather, 90% of what we each consider to be our own physical body is actually a mass of microscopic life forms, known as our microbiome.
The microbiome is a complex community of bacteria, fungi, microbes, viruses, and other tiny lifeforms that enable us to carry out critical functions, such as eating and breathing. They also help to determine how our bodies interact with the rest of the world, how they grow, and how they fend off disease.
Beyond living on and within human bodies, the microbiome lives on and/or in everything, from soils to oceans and everything that lives within them. And, in essence, each microbiome community is tantamount to an entire ecosystem.
Jo Handelsman, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and Associate Director for Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, founded the National Microbiome Initiative, a half-billion dollar effort, to understand microbiomes.
Handelsman’s research at the Handelsman Lab at Yale University focuses on understanding diversity in microbial communities and their role in infectious and other diseases as microbial communities in soil and water as potential sources of new antibiotics and antibiotic resistant genes.
Disruptions to human microbial communities have been implicated in problems such as obesity, autism, multiple sclerosis, irritable bowel disease and mental health issues.
Imbalances in microbial communities in oceans can lead to zones of low oxygen, killing off fish and ocean life, while imbalances in soils can lead to crop failure.
According to Handelsman, “We need the means to change dysfunctional microbiomes and make them functional – whether it’s the human gut or the ocean.” The plan is to develop technology to manipulate and optimise microbial communities.
The ultimate goal is to control and alter microbes to improve either human or environmental health.
Funding for the Microbiome Initiative is being provided by the US Government along with more than 100 universities, charities, foundations and companies. Researchers are working together at the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California, San Diego.
Additional privately funded initiatives to study the microbiome are now under way.Kavli Foundation is putting up $1 million to develop new research tools. While the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine is opening a Microbiome Clinic which will offer whole-genome sequencing, checking patients to see if their bodies harbor antibiotic-resistant “superbugs, and offering microbiome transplants.
Understanding the specific functions of these tiny organisms is super-challenging, as each microbiome community is unique and incredibly complex. For example, we each have trillions of microbes live on our skin, in our noses, in our intestinal tracts, and that many of them play critical roles in keeping us healthy.
The microbiome impacts all life. Microbes in the ocean pull carbon out of the air to moderate global warming. Microbes in soil impact food production. Microbes can even give evidence of crime -- people shed “microbial clouds” which can be gathered and analyzed forensically.
Looking at the numbers so far, there are now trillions and trillions bytes of data that have been generated by the Human Microbiome Project. It is estimated that there might be nearly 8 million unique microbial genes across the body of the adults studied. No one microbe is present in every person. Different bacteria may be performing the same function across different individuals.
The majority of the microbiome lives in your gut, and there are hundreds of different species in there. Things like what you eat, where you live, and what you do, along with your genetic make up all affect which species of microbes live in your gut.
Now, investigators at UCLA have demonstrated that tea, and in particular black tea, may promote weight loss and other health benefits by changing bacteria within the gut. Findings from the new study—published recently in the European Journal of Nutrition, in an article entitled “Decaffeinated Green and Black Tea Polyphenols Decrease Weight Gain and Alter Microbiome Populations and Function in Diet-Induced Obese Mice”—show that in mice black tea alters energy metabolism in the liver by changing gut metabolites.
Check out The Microbiome Diet, by Dr. Raphael Kellman, to learn more about how you can better manage your body by managing your microbiome with food.
For some more info on the microbiome check out this blog.
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