New Study Looks at Ancestor’s Gut Microbiome to Improve Health
A fascinating new study shows our gut microbiome has been experiencing a potentially catastrophic loss of diversity over the last millennium, possibly giving rise to various common chronic diseases. Is it too late to avoid irreversible damage to our health?
While most of us don’t ever think about it, we coexist with over 100 trillion microbes, the majority of which live in our gut and are essential to our health. Though the existence of the microbiome was first recognized in the 1990s, the full understanding of its importance and mechanisms is still in its infancy.
Dr. Alex Kostic is a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School, who has been studying the microbiome as a mediator of disease. “You know, this concept of the microbiome as a community of organisms living on humans and other mammals, and playing an integral role in our physiology really is a new concept, something that people have only been studying for the past 10-15 years or so,” Kostic said. “But what we’ve come to realize, as we study the ecology of all of the microorganisms living on humans, especially in the gut, is that it’s incredibly diverse, and pathogens are really the exception to the rule. Everything else has a lot of other roles that we’re still trying to tap into, but we can be fairly confident that they’re not driving disease in people.”
In their quest for a clear picture of the microbiome, researchers have recently turned to studying its history.
“What’s really gotten me interested in the history of the human microbiome, is this concept of being able to identify, if it exists, a ‘universal ancestral human microbiome,’ something that was common to all of us before the process of industrialization,” Kostic said.
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Scientists Finally Finished Mapping the Human Genome
Scientists announce they have finally completed the map of the entire human genome. Will the information contained within unlock our true potential for health and wellbeing, or is there another more expansive perspective on the role genes play in our lives?
After decades of research, scientists have recently announced the completion of the human genome, what some call “the genetic instruction book.” Widely used for guiding biomedical research, many experts herald this as a crowning achievement in the field.
Dr. Bruce Lipton is a cellular biologist and a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, which takes a comprehensive, cutting-edge approach to the understanding of our relationship to our genes.
“Most people are really excited about the fact that the human genome has been deciphered; they’ve identified how many genes are in the human genome,” Lipton said. “The original reason for the human genome was, it was thought the genes control all the characteristics of our life and therefore if I had a compendium of all the genes I could fix anybody who has a characteristic they want to change. Francis Crick, one of the cofounders of the story, came up with something called “the central dogma,” the belief that genes are the source of biological information.
“They’re translated into another form of nucleic acid called RNA. So, DNA goes into RNA which is like a xeroxed copy of the DNA, and then the RNA is used as a template to make the proteins of the body,” he said. “According to the central dogma, information only flows in one way — it flows from the DNA to the RNA to the protein. This led to an understanding called ‘genetic determinism.’ Genetic determinism is the belief that the genetic blueprint of your life is carried by the DNA that you inherited at the moment of conception.”
