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Over 140k virus species in the human gut, half of which are new to science
- ericra 6y agoFor those interested in the topic of microbes living in/on our bodies, I highly recommend Ed Yong's book I Contain Multitudes: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-multitudes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-multi... He is a fantastic writer, and I really enjoyed the book. You might also be familiar with his COVID articles for The Atlantic, which were some of the best coverage of COVID issues throughout 2020.
- pdfernhout 6y ago"10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness" by Alanna Collen (2016) is another good book on this topic.
- erikig 6y agoThanks for sharing. I'm intrigued by the topic but every time I've tried to find some good reading material, I've found myself going down some pseudo-science rabbit holes.
- flobosg 6y agoI would add Carl Zimmer’s “A Planet of Viruses” as well.
- rossdavidh 6y agoHypothesis: general anti-virals (i.e. something that kills most viruses, rather than being fine-tuned to a specific virus) will have the unintended consequence of killing viruses which prey on bacteria in our gut microbiome. That, in turn, will alter the balance of bacteria in our gut, leading to (slow-to-appear) major health issues. All somewhat similar to the autoimmune and allergic issues resulting from overuse of antibiotics. Just a hypothesis. But the number of viruses in the gut, the vast majority of which we know nothing about, does reveal an awful lot of room for unintended consequences.
- thebean11 6y agoThat's assuming that these species won't just be eventually reintroduced through food, air, human interaction etc.
- ddingus 6y agoI had this happen with a strong antibiotic and a longer than usual course. My gut has seen a lot from various parts of the world. It's like starting over. The more places I revisit, the better things have become. But yeah, significant changes. Ahem... lots of irregularity, as if many foods were new. (and in a sense they were) The reintroduction idea is valid IMHO, based on some of my own experiences.
- war1025 6y agoI read the book "Never Home Alone" [1] a year or two ago, which is about all the different microbes and insects and such that are in the environment around us. One of the things the author mentioned a few times is to never assume that something you find around your house has been cataloged or studied before. There are relatively few scientists who study such things. One of the anecdotes was that someone the author knew discovered two or three new species of insect just by going out into his backyard and looking around. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088985-never-home-alone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088985-never-home-alon...
- robotnikman 6y agoI've always wondered this myself, how many bugs in my own backyard have never been studied or classified? When you include microscopic organisms, it is definitely in the many thousands.
- m3kw9 6y agoThis is why the body is so hard to understand because all these viruses like have multiple feedback loops with each other or with groups.
- asdff 6y agoBiology is enormously complicated. Imagine coming to a code base written in an entirely undocumented language, with 1.5 gigabytes of this incomprehensible source code (for human genome), and figuring out how this script works with the millions of other scripts of varying length in your gut or in the environment, given you have a very small working knowledge of the overall machine that runs this code and can't easily take it apart and try and figure out what is happening (short of experiments where you essentially try unplugging a single thing at a time and see what happens to the machine [mutant screen]).
- m3kw9 6y agoYes and add that all in spaghetti code
- jakobnissen 6y agoPerhaps I'm being pedantic, but there is a crucial way in which the "DNA as source code" analogy breaks down: Even with an unknown language, you still knows basically how the computer itself works. A better analogy is an unknown, minimized language, running on unknown hardware, whose chips run unknown and self-modifying microcode such that the same source code may not even produce the same results.
- stunt 6y agoYes, mankind got advance enough to study it, but ended up spending all its money on celebrities and building stuff that nobody really need. I wonder how anyone is able to study them while making skin care products that never work are more profitable than vaccine research. You read history and wonder why many emperors wasted their resources on building palaces with gold, but we're even more inefficient today if you compare our resources and population. It's more attractive for kids to become an influencer than a scientist today and probably it always has been just like this.
- fsckboy 6y agobacteria species living in the human gut makes sense to me. But what does it mean for a virus species to be located in the human gut? constantly reinfecting new stomach cells as they are generated? infecting the bacteria in the gut? edit: I saw another comment recommending "I Contain Multitudes" so I figured I search it for "virus" (thanks libgen) and found this: "There are viruses too, in unfathomable numbers – a “virome” that infects all the other microbes and occasionally the host’s cells."
- retrac 6y agoAs the article says, they're bacteriophages, viruses which primarily infect the bacteria.
- psychiatrist24 6y agoOMG, what if one of them MUTATES?
- option 6y agoI currently decided to give this startup https://www.thryveinside.com/ https://www.thryveinside.com/ a try since they claim to help improve your gut microbiome. Anyone tried them before? Hard to asses how scientifically sound their offering is.
- RemingtonLak 6y agoI personally don't think we have a clue as this article clearly states we've just begun to understand by not understanding. I would be cautious since they are doing nothing but feeding you what they feel are "essential" gut bacterias. the danger is, there has to be a balance. You can have an overgrowth that you may not be able to reverse. Again, I think this article exemplifies what we don't yet know so, a company providing a ready made solution seems a little much? The best thing you can do for your gut isn't yet practical which is to find a bio/genetic/ethnic compatible person and do an FMT and do the rebalancing this company is promising for real. yeah. a bit futuristic but have been done and proven to work if you need helping an aliment such as Crohn's.
- wombatmobile 6y agoBacteria can transfer sequences of DNA directly to each other in real time, through an amazing process called conjugation that looks like a sci-fi movie in outer space. This is how gut bacteria can develop resistance so quickly. They don't have to go through a generational process of breeding and selection. They just share a piece of DNA code that confers immunity and they are good to go. Let's take a look at this process in action, from the vantage point of the membrane wall of one bacterium: Type 4 secretion system: ii- Pilus biogenesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihlFqOK5cZM
- redisman 6y agoThat video looks very interesting but how do I build some context on what any of these colored shapes are?
- majkinetor 6y agoSo the logic is to attack them with adaptable crew that look to them like sci-fi movie in outer space - viruses. Those guys fight for millions of years. Its also in another dimension of reality we currently do not have much access to (only glimpses).
- cjdell 6y agoI notice many here are talking about FMT. As I've suffered years with debilitating IBS (likely due to a terrible diet in my 20's) I have wanted to try FMT for years. I am currently undergoing a 2 week FMT course at the Taymount Clinic in the UK. I must say I'm impressed with their professionalism and along with the transplants themselves they also offer advice on lifestyle changes to prevent a reoccurrence of dysbiosis. It's too early to tell but feel like it is helping. If I have so called "leaky gut" then it will be a few more months before my gut fully heals. The hope is that I'll be able to eat gluten/dairy/sugars again without agonising symptoms of bloating, gas and diarrhoea.
- zupa-hu 6y agoSuper interesting! May I ping you about the results in a few months? Best of luck!
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI've done a little skimming of comments here and I don't want to reply to any specific comment. But some general thoughts: Some conditions cause severe malabsorption and then doctors medically prescribe digestive enzymes. These enzymes can be effectively used to combat viral infections if you take them on an empty stomach between meals instead of with meals like they are supposed to be used. Random spontaneous thought: Maybe this is one of the things fasting does that has an impact on health. When you don't eat, digestive enzymes in the body attack microbes. (And the gut is home to 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body. There's a lot happening there.) Also: one of the things that makes gut issues complicated is you need to keep the stomach sufficiently acid to do its job while trying to address chemical imbalances and other stuff. If your stomach gets to be too alkaline, you can outright start throwing up from inability to digest food at all. Keep in mind that viruses are made of RNA and DNA is just two strands of RNA bolted together, basically. (Those are laymen's terms, because I'm a layman. If anyone knows the fancier, more accurate explanation, feel free to have at it.) So there is research suggesting that viruses are actually a source of genetic material for humans. It helps me to think of all this like some messy, organic soup of code. Or nanomachines exchanging code. Something like that. DNA is the code that writes physical reality* and it's quite small and gets swapped out and we are only just beginning to understand all that. (Edit: not all physical reality. Just the biology bits.)
- flobosg 6y ago> viruses are made of RNA Depending on the species, a virus can contain either DNA or RNA as its genetic material. Check out the Baltimore classification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification) for more info. > So there is research suggesting that viruses are actually a source of genetic material for humans. They are! Endogenous retroviruses and the syncytin protein (involved in placental development) are some known examples.
- majkinetor 6y agoGreat comment. I recommend Bromelain (from Annas stem) as one of those enzymes which is virtually side effect free.
- RemingtonLak 6y agoI don't think we will ever get to understanding even 10%. I think the cause and effect of what happens in our mouth/throat/stomach/small/large intestines connection will ever ben understood. Unlike the advancements we've made in trying understand the brain which we've only begun. From all that gather, the cause and effect like one bacteria's waste is another's feed to yet another etc.. I do know yes, we found certain vitamins are made in the gut including many hormones like why is 90% of Serotonin made in colon but bulk of it is used in the brain? It has been found that there are neurons in our gut thus the "2nd brain" Hypothesis. Not going into specifics, I can tell you without a doubt my fasting has made a huge impact to my health although I'm not doing it long enough >5 days nor often enough. Further that by eating garbage high carb/sugar when back to "normal." It's been speculated and I believe it's for real that if everyone fasts at least one full day a week and do IM 16:8 the rest. Most of the aliments people are currently dealing with will be almost gone. I clearly feel going into ketosis after a full day of fasting. I fast 3-5 days once a qtr and every week I fast Mondays. If I had the money and motivation. I would start a startup that does the following: At your puberty, you bank/cryofreeze your blood and when you are the pinnacle of your gut/body health in your 20's cryofreeze your stool. Then in your 50-60's, reimplant your stool and your blood. We lose so much along the way, by the time we're in our later age, we need to reconstitute it to reinvigorate your gut and possibly reverse aliments. I truly believe this business model could work.
- zupa-hu 6y agoThere is clearly a marketplace opportunity here. For Elon’s samples, obviously.
- pauljurczak 6y agocrAssphage? Did someone have a bit of fun with vocabulary?
- jakobnissen 6y agoIt's short for cross-assembly phage. It keeps showing up in metagenomic studies (especially when doing cross-assembly of the metagenome), but it's mostly uncharacterized (or at least was, a handful of years back. Not sure about now). So the name implies that we can detect its presence and gets its genome with genetic analysis, but have very little idea of what it actually is or does.
- arnoooooo 6y agoWith so many unknown species, how do we know that the gene sequences used to detect covid in PCR tests are actually only found in covid ? How do we know the specificity of the test ?
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