Your virome

Scientists are learning more and more about our microbiomes—the 100 trillion bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa that live on and in our bodies. They can do this because advances in genome sequencing allow them to determine an organism’s DNA. But they don’t know much about the viruses that live in our guts—in fact, 99 percent of gut viruses are unknown to science. To try to make some headway into this dearth of information, some scientists studied the gut viruses of ten people for over a year. They learned two things: 1) gut virus populations are stable; 2) gut viruses are person-specific (your gut viruses are not like my gut viruses).

They surmise that some viruses are better for your health than others, but—for now—they don’t know which viruses may be good and which may be bad. They do know that most of the viruses in our guts are bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria, replicate inside them, and kill them. I suppose those may be good ones. Maybe not. (See an earlier post for an example of bacteriophages at work, killing disease-resistant bacteria.)

The more scientists study our gut microbiomes, the more they are discovering ways in which these microscopic organisms affect our health. Recently, drug regulators in China approved a drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The drug adjusts the gut microbiome such that inflammation-causing amino acids from gut bacteria no longer irritate the brain. A neurologist at the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam remarked “These results advance our understanding of the mechanisms that play a role in Alzheimer’s disease and imply that the gut microbiome is a valid target for the development of therapies.” Maybe they should have been studying guts all along instead of brains.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.