Exciting Microbe Research? Temper That Giddy Feeling in Your Gut

While we have long known about the existence of microbes — the tiny bacteria, fungi and archaea that live all around, on and in us — our full relationship has become one of the hottest topics for research only in recent years.

Scientists believe that every person contains as many independent microbial cells as human cells. This collection of life, known as the microbiome, provides useful functions for us. Indeed, some of the things we think our bodies do are actually the abilities and enzymes of life-forms living within us. They can help with digestion, vitamin synthesis and even immunological responses.

But, as with many new breakthroughs and advances, the hype of the microbiome often outweighs the reality. This seems especially likely in the field of nutrition. Doing research on the microbiome is not easy, and there are many opportunities to foul things up. To accomplish human studies, large samples of people and microbiomes are needed to account for potential confounding variables.

Specimens have to be collected and stored carefully because contamination has been a big problem. DNA has to be extracted, amplified and sequenced. Finally, powerful bioinformatics tools are necessary to assemble and analyze the huge amount of data contained in a sequence of nucleotides — all of which has resulted in a wide range of new “omics,” including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.

Of course, if we think that microbes play a large role in health, we have to rethink the role that antimicrobials play in our lives. In this thinking, antibiotics and antifungals could be life-changing or life-threatening. But that’s not the case. There are many reasons to avoid unnecessary use of these medications, but the microbiome appears able to withstand most treatment.

Still, antimicrobials clearly have an effect on the microbiome. Many studies, along with common sense, suggest that when we treat people with antibiotics, we change the amount and type of microbes that live in our gut. We’ve seen this with Clostridium difficile.