How many bacterias live in our bodies? The Human Microbiota and Microbiome.

We are never alone, and that´s a fact, actually we move around the entire day with trillions of living bacterias within us, yes it´s not a mistake TRILLIONS of bacterias and a major part of them are in our guts  that´s a 1 with 18 zeros, looks like this: 1.000.000.000.000.000.000, but hold on that´s only 1 trillion and every single one of us is carrying from 10 to 100 trillion bacterias with us, basically more living bacterias in our gut than humans in the world, this huge amount of symbiotic microbial cells are the Human Microbiota they establish in our system in our early life and is shaped by our enviroment, diet and pre-exposure to certain microbes, nevertheless they are not what we think, as long they stay in the right place they would do no harm to us, as matter of fact these guys help us a lot and not only work with us on diggestive task, they also have a huge impact in our health “Microbiome is a Word that describe the genes these cells harbor” basically the genetic information of the Human Microbiota. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426293/)”...Ursell LK, Metcalf JL, Parfrey LW, Knight R. Defining the Human Microbiome. Nutrition reviews. 2012;70(Suppl 1):S38-S44. doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2012.00493.x…”

Just to compare our microbiota to us as human beins, our genome, the Human Genome project: which is the genetic info we carry in our cells, the DNA (basically the instructions of how we are build and how we function) consist of about 22.000 genes, our microbiota instead have around 3.3 Millions genes, way more than we have, is a very complex system that live within us, the microbiome can vary from each región of the world, and as you can imagine hundreds of scienticist are studying the Microbiome to understand them and how they affect us.

In the following lines i´m goin to talk a little bit about the history of this topic, i´m also going to share a Little info about the changes on our microbiota/microbiome and the susceptibility towards some conditions such as Celiac disease, Type I diabetes, Obesity, please be advise that this is new material and currently there are lots of research groups all over the world searching for the correlation of the Microbiome and humans conditions, the info i´m about to share have educational pourpose only and is not intendent to be used to diagnose or treat any existing condition.

We have a couple of centuries noticing the difference in the bacterias that live with us, the first guy that notice the bacteria in our mouth are different from the one in our poop was Antonie van Leewenhoek back in 1680, he was the first person who reported that there where big differences in the bacterias of the sample he took him self from the mouth and his fecal matter (poop), from 1680 to present day we have moved from why we have different bacterias in different áreas of our body? To understand how our actions affect them and how their action affect us!

Currently there are a big relations of us as human being and our microbiota, Antibiotics is a key topic of this issue nevertheless i will talk about it apart in some of my following post, below you will see some of the publications i read for this topic and how this trillions of tiny organism affect our day to day life.

Obesity: a 2006 Nature publication (“Nature 444, 1027-1031, December 21, 2006) (URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05414) suggest the role of microbiome with the possibility to develop obesity, they mention the role of a microbiome which is able to harvest more energy from the diet, than the regular microbiome, basically these persons are able to get more calories than regular persons from an specific portion of food, obviously this is not conclusive, and there´s still a long way to go until we have tools to take care of this conditions, this test were run on mice and human volunteers but is a really interesting role of our microbiome.

Type 1 diabetes: as you may not is different from type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes is caused by an autoinmune response against some páncreas cells, a 2018 publication from Microbiome Journal (https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-018-0417-4) mention the differnerce they found in the microbiome of childrens with Type 1 diabetes and childrens without type 1 diabetes, specifically a drop in the diversity of bacterias in the childrens with type 1 diabetes.

Celiac disease: Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder (our body attack itself) that is triggered when predisposed people eat gluten, which is a protein found in wheat and some other cereals that cause the reaction leading to a damage in the small intestine, this is almost the same case as Type 1 diabetes, in the following study from the Microbiome journal (https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-018-0415-6) from february 2018 mention the study of childrens at familial risk of developing celiac disease, 5 year after they start the investigation they noticed that some childrens develope the disease and some other don´t, they check their microbiome and found that the ones who develope the disease had a lower diversity than the ones who stay healthy, so they propose the following conclusión and i quote: “…The findings suggest that alterations in the early trajectory of gut microbiota in infants at CD risk could influence the immune maturation process and predispose to CD, although larger population studies are warranted to confirm this hypothesis…”

So with this small review we can see how important are these bacterias for us, there are publications that even mention the relation of our microbiome to the way we feel, isn´t that crazy? A small bacteria in our guts make us feel a specific emotion or make us decide for a specific type of food? Well belevie me or not this might be true, as soon i have some good scitific publications about it i will share it with you guys, please let me know if you like the theme, or if you want me to talk about any specific topic, i´m open to do the research and bring to you good information to expand our knowledge in Microbiology and life sciences.

Regards

Rafael & Diolena

All photos have been downloaded from https://pixabay.com/
Bacteria photo link: https://pixabay.com/es/anatom%C3%ADa-bacterias-bacteria-160524/
Wheat photo link: https://pixabay.com/es/maizal-campo-de-trigo-trigo-195642/
Blood sugar device photo link: https://pixabay.com/es/diabetes-az%C3%BAcar-en-la-sangre-528678/
gene puzzle photo link: https://pixabay.com/es/rompecabezas-adn-investigaci%C3%B3n-2500333/