Scientists
working on the gut microbiome have discovered and isolated more than 100
completely new species of bacteria from healthy people's intestines. The study
from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hudson Institute of Medical Research,
Australia, and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, has created the most
comprehensive collection of human intestinal bacteria to date. This will help
researchers worldwide to investigate how our microbiome keeps us healthy, and
its role in disease.
The new resource will allow
scientists to detect which bacteria are present in the human gut, more
accurately and faster than ever before. This will also provide the foundation
to develop new ways of treating diseases such as gastrointestinal disorders,
infections and immune conditions.
About
2 per cent of a person's body weight is due to bacteria and the
intestinal microbiome is a major bacterial site and an essential contributor to
human health. Imbalances in our gut microbiome can contribute to diseases and
complex conditions such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome
allergies and obesity. However, as many species of gut bacteria are extremely
difficult to grow in the laboratory, there is a huge gap in our knowledge of
them.
In
this study, researchers studied faecal samples from 20 people from the UK and
Canada, and successfully grew and DNA sequenced 737 individual bacterial
strains from these. Analysis of these isolates revealed 273 separate bacterial
species, including 173 that had never previously been sequenced. Of these, 105
species had never even been isolated before.
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Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle, Pharmaceutical Microbiology
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