Stomach these bacteria

In what is a blow to resilient human vanity, scientists (damn their gut feeling) have reiterated that the trillion bacteria that inhabit the human intestines are what make us tick.

In what is a blow to resilient human vanity, scientists (damn their gut feeling) have reiterated that the trillion bacteria that inhabit the human intestines are what make us tick. Most of these gut bacteria are diligent workers who contribute to the day-to-day functioning of the human body, to an extent far more than what the genome does. The staggering part of this recent study, published in the journal Science, is that these microbes have been identified in just one part of the body. Imagine the result if scientists delved up the nose or got under the skin.

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The fundamental is something like this. Traditionally, we are taught that food ingested gets broken down/converted into elements, which then get absorbed into the body. No question was, as such, asked about who or what drives the breaking down or the conversion. Who or what creates the enzymes and eschews on the byproducts of digestion? Apparently, a battalion of bacteria do. What scientists are now trying to narrow down on is to identify a core group of bacteria that may be functional in all body systems — a DNA-based approach to identify a ‘core bacteriome’. If so, then the implications are gigantic for future drug development. The discovery (for which scientists received the Nobel this year) of Helicobacter pylori (the bacteria that causes ulcer) points in this direction as well. Of course, there are detractors to the study who want to know where the ‘super-organism’ stops and the ‘environment’ begins.

For now, this is biology at its ‘microminiest’ level. And at the macro level — it is awesome if the human body is then revealed to be, in itself, a thriving ecosystem. Quite a thought, that. So keep your bacteria. And the faith that the more we find, the more we know how little we do.