Meet your microbes

            In this video is Bruce Birren, who is the director of the Genome Sequencing Center for Infectious Diseases and the co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, gives an amazing lecture explaining HMP and some interesting findings coming from this project. The lecture is about an hour long so in case you just don’t have the time to view it I will go over a few of the highlights.

• ·         Clostridium Difficile infection has become a major issue in the hospitals, due to the amount of antibiotics and other medicines patients are given for treatment. While these medicines are essential they also have the adverse effect of killing of bacteria in the body that aids the body, especially in the gut. Without this bacteria here other bacteria can inhabit the gut, like C. difficile, and cause major illness. This particular illness can be treated, but many times it is likely to become recurrent. With research coming from HMP a new treatment, fecal transplant, has arose that is helping cure the most severe cases. Yes this treatment is as bizarre as it sounds! A specimen of stool from a healthy person is collected and the microbes from this sample are then injected into the ill person’s gut so that these microbes can recolonize their gut. It is an astounding breakthrough for medicine! Treatments like this are not only cost effective, but unlike so many medicines these days it is natural with no side effects.
• ·         Research has shown that people with varying inflammatory diseases, like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, also have very distinct microbial communities when compared to healthy individuals and one another. This implies that there is a chance that a relationship exists between certain make-ups of microbial communities and disease. If this turns out to be the case, these chronic diseases that often have no cure can be treated effectively by reestablishing new microbial communities within them, just like is seen in the fecal transplants.
• ·         Correlations have been observed between a person’s weight and the bacteria in their gut. In a lean individual the gut contains a lesser amount of firmicutes and more bacteroidetes, while an obese individual’s gut contains more firmicutes and less bacteroidetes. When the obese individual dieted for a year changes in the amount of these bacteria were seen every few months. By the end of the year these obese people microbes now looked like those of the lean people, containing less firmicutes and more bacteroidetes. This information could lead to new and effective ways of aiding obese people reach healthy weights with the use of bacteria.

          For more mind blowing information watch the video!!