By Mark M Green (sciencefromaway.com)
Prokaryotes have been called “The Unseen Majority.” These microscopic organisms constitute 60-100% of the estimated total carbon in all plants on earth. Bacteria are prokaryotes, which are found in all places, from the atmosphere to the polar-regions to the soil of the earth to the deepest oceans and in all plants and animals, including us. For example, all surfaces and cavities in our bodies are covered and filled with these most ancient forms of life—estimated to be more than three billion years old and which are much simpler forms of life than the eukaryotes, the cells that we are made of, which are estimated to be no more than about two billion years in existence on the Earth. To put this in context, the Earth is estimated to be more than four billion years old. The bacteria came first and they and we, who are made of eukaryotic cells, are made of the same chemicals arranged in a different way. Hans Krebs for whom the cycle is named that delivers energy to all our cells, pointed out in his 1953 Nobel Prize lecture that the basic metabolic processes for the energy production at use in the prokaryotes and eukaryotes is “powerful support for the concept of evolution,” and “that life in its present forms has arisen only once.”
There are estimated to be more than ten times more prokaryote and related microbial cells within us than human cells, making up as much as 1 to 3% of our body weight. Much of that weight is in our gut where scientists are increasingly discovering that much about us, including health and disease, is associated with what is called the bacteria within us, the “microbiome” or alternatively, the “forgotten organ.”
All animals similarly harbor this forgotten organ. I found in the December 3, 2012 issue of Chemical and Engineering News an article entitled “Microbiome Mining,” which presents the work being done on various cellulose-digesting animals. Breaking cellulose to its constituent sugars is a far better way than using starch (which is in competition with our own food sources) to produce ethanol to add to gasoline; it’s no surprise that researchers have focused on pandas, which subsist on nearly 30 pounds a day of bamboo. The cellulose in the bamboo is converted to sugars, not by the panda, but by the bacteria in its gut, which was determined by collecting the panda’s excrement. Engineers are trying to translate this information and similar findings to an industrial scale by studying the excrement of other cellulose-eating animals (such as cows).
And then there is known about the effects of the bacteria (microbiota) in our guts. In an April 3, 2015 issue of Science there’s an article entitled “Cancer and the Microbiota,” discussing experiments showing, as the authors put it, “…microbes and the microbiota may amplify or mitigate carcinogenesis, responsiveness to cancer therapeutics, and cancer-associated-complications.” Here’s another from the highly respected Mayo Clinic. A terribly debilitating intestinal bacterial problem often encountered in hospital stays, Clostridium difficile infection, which often defies a solution, is cured in 90% of the cases by a procedure called FMT, fecal microbiota transplantation. Yes, this is excrement from a healthy person injected it into the stricken patient’s gut—a reverse enema so-to-speak. Apparently the “good bacteria” overcome and displace the disease causing varieties. Parallel results come from the Cleveland Clinic, another distinguished medical facility. The idea of fecal transplant is not new. Chinese researchers, in a letter to Nature in 2012 noted that this was done 1700 years ago in China for certain maladies. There’s an excellent article worth reading about fecal transplant in Science in the August 30, 2013 issue entitled “The Promise of Poop”. Here is more. There is evidence accumulating, discussed in an article in Current Psychiatry Reports in 2013 entitled “The Gut Microbiome: A New Frontier in Autism Research.” The title says a lot but if you want more: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23307560
Here are some things to think about. Jet lag and the associated change in our internal clock, and times of eating, change the microbial content of our guts, often leading to unpleasant gut related problems. Also, the bacteria in our gut change with the environment of our homes and with whom we associate. And it is little surprise that isolated human beings living in the Amazon have bacterial content in their guts reflecting their isolation from modern drugs including antibiotics. Consistent with this finding, in an article in the New Yorker in 2012 by Michael Specter, Martin Blaser is noted to have given a plenary lecture to other doctors entitled “The Menace of Antibiotics.” And finally in the same magazine, Emily Eakin, in 2014, titled a piece, worth reading, “The Excrement Experiment,” about a Greenwich Village resident with Crohn’s disease.
