Lifeboat Foundation

Viruses that infect bacteria – called phages – are abundant in our bodies, and they seem to have beneficial effects when our cells engulf them.

By Kamal Nahas

Bacterial diversity in the gut plays an important role in health. The human microbiome has featured prominently in research, with links being made between it and cancer, personality, memory, and diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

While it’s understood that a mother’s microbiome is transferred to their baby at birth and boosted by breastfeeding, what other sources of gut bacteria are there? A new study by researchers at the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in Austria has confirmed, for the first time, that one source is fruits and vegetables.

The human gut microbiome has a crucial connection to our health and well-being, but it is a complex entity made up of many different organisms, which all have an effect on one another. The hundreds of different microbial species in the gut metabolize the foods we consume in different ways, and the metabolites that microbes generate are often then consumed by other microbes. It’s been suggested that the more than half of the stuff that is eaten by gut microbes are byproducts of other gut microbes. This interdependence can have profound implications for the gut microbiome, and some species become totally reliant on the presence of others.

Scientists are still learning about the various characteristics of a healthy human gut microbiome, but there are certain species that tend to be present. High diversity in the microbiome is also typically associated with good health. While some microbes can fill in the gaps if other important ones are missing, some species can’t be substituted.

Magnets are magnificent. Made of iron, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, and various other metals, they’re used in compasses for navigation, in medical imaging machines to see inside the human body, in kitchens to keep cabinets and refrigerators closed, in computers to store data and in new high-speed “hyperloop” trains that can travel at speeds of up to 76 miles per hour.

For environmentalists, however, the most exciting use yet for magnets might be a newly discovered application out of Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, otherwise known as RMIT University: Using magnets, researchers there have discovered a novel way of removing harmful microplastics from water.

“[Microplastics] can take up to 450 years to degrade, are not detectable and removable through conventional treatment systems, resulting in millions of tons being released into the sea every year,” co-lead research Nasir Mahmood said in a statement. “This is not only harmful for aquatic life, but also has significant negative impacts on human health.”

A new study shows that cerebrospinal fluid reduces current treatment efficacy in brain cancer and identifies new therapeutic opportunities.

Cerebrospinal fluid, the clear colorless liquid that protects the brain, also may be a factor that makes brain cancers resistant to treatment, Australian researchers led by Associate Professor Cedric Bardy at the South Austraila Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) and Flinders University reveal in the journal Science Advances.

Reporting how this occurs, the study, titled “Human cerebrospinal fluid affects chemoradiotherapy sensitivities in tumor cells from patients with glioblastoma,” in Science Advances shows that a decades-old anti-anxiety drug can improve the effectiveness of chemo-radiotherapy towards glioblastoma, or GBM, the most common and lethal brain cancer.

The results of a human study carried out by an international research team have provided valuable new insights into the activity of the brain’s noradrenaline (NA) system, which has been a longtime target for medications to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, and anxiety. The study employed what the researchers claim is a groundbreaking methodology, developed to record real-time chemical activity from standard clinical electrodes implanted into the brain routinely for epilepsy monitoring.

The results offer up new insights into brain chemistry, which could have implications for a wide array of medical conditions, and also demonstrate use of the new strategy for acquiring data from the living human brain.

“Our group is describing the first ‘fast’ neurochemistry recorded by voltammetry from conscious humans,” said Read Montague, PhD, the VTC Vernon Mountcastle research professor at Virginia Tech, and director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. “This is a big step forward and the methodological approach was implemented completely in humans – after more than 11 years of extensive development.” Montague is senior, and co-corresponding author of the researchers’ published paper in Current Biology, which is titled “Noradrenaline tracks emotional modulation of attention in human amygdala.” In their paper the authors concluded, “By showing that neuromodulator estimates can be obtained from depth electrodes already in standard clinical use in the conscious human brain, our study opens the door to a new area of research on the neuromodulatory basis of human health and disease.”

An international research team led by scientists at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research has found a way to determine which species of gut microbiota are important in certain diseases, and how they interact with other microorganisms to create a healthy microbiome.

The team developed a computational metabolite exchange scoring system to identify microbial cross feeding relationships—the use of metabolites produced by one microorganism as an essential nutrients by another—and how these may be altered in disease. The researchers suggest that understanding such relationships could point to therapeutic approaches for a range of disorders including inflammatory bowel disease, infections, autoimmune diseases and cancer.

“There are roughly 1,000 different bacterial species in a healthy gut—it’s a microscopic multicultural community with over a trillion individual members,” said research lead Samuel Forster, PhD. “Bacteria in our microbiomes exist as communities that rely on each other to produce and share key nutrients between them … We have developed a new computational way to understand these dependencies and their role in shaping our microbiome. This new method unlocks our understanding of the gut microbiome and provides a foundation for new treatment options that selectively remodel microbial communities.”

The more diverse species in your gut, the better it is for your health. Now an international team led by the Hudson Institute of Medical Research has found a way to determine which species are important and how they interact to create a healthy microbiome.

Understanding these relationships opens the door to a new world of medical opportunities for conditions from inflammatory bowel disease to infections, autoimmune diseases and cancers.

Associate Professor Samuel Forster and his team at Hudson Institute of Medical Research, working with collaborators from the Institute for Systems Biology in the U.S. and local collaborators at Monash University and Monash Health, have spent years studying the gut microbiome and working out which species perform which functions.

Radiotherapy (also called radiation therapy), a commonly used cancer treatment that uses high-energy radiation, can effectively eliminate or shrink various types of tumors. While radiotherapy benefits many cancer patients, the associated side effects can hinder cancer survivors’ quality of life and overall health.

When a patient receives radiation treatments, the radiation damages the DNA. If the DNA damage becomes severe enough, the cancer cell will not recover and will stop dividing and die. Unfortunately, the exact mechanisms by which radiation elicits cancer cell death can cause similar damage in nearby healthy cells, leading to significant toxicities in some cases.

Many malignancies that develop in the pelvic region, including urinary and rectal cancers, are susceptible to pelvic radiotherapy. Some patients receiving pelvic radiotherapy develop debilitating bowel symptoms, including intestinal inflammation. Doctors do not fully understand these clinical challenges despite the common occurrence of bowel symptoms following pelvic radiotherapy. A better understanding of the link between radiation and bowel damage could help doctors manage cancer treatment more optimally, enhancing survivorship.