Posted on July 23rd, 2009 by Craig Maltby, Editor
Immune balance goes to Mars
Another article on beneficial bacteria in the gut–and in other areas of the body–is published this week in
the New York Times. The angle on this piece,written by an evolutionary biologist, is fascinating. It discusses the idea that beneficial bacteria which aid our immune system response have their own unique genetic map–or genome–that can evolve and change over their lifetimes, compared to human genes, which do not change.
The author, Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London, states a mind-blowing statistic: that microbial cells living in our body outnumber our own “human” species cells by a factor of 10-1. (Our human cells are much larger than the microbial cells; that’s why we’re not a walking blob of biomass.)
How these genetically morphing, multi-species organisms impact health, disease, mortality or overall growth and development is the next frontier. Maybe even the next-next frontier. If unlocking the human genome was biology’s Manhattan Project, unlocking the microbial genome may be the Mission to Mars.
