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FASCINATING: what happens when you swallow a grenade?

Dreambirdie

work in progress
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N. California
A great article on what happens when you take anti-biotics.

"It’s not easy to track what happens to this complex organ of ours when we take antibiotics. Monitoring the microbiome of a single person demands a lot of medical, microbiological, and genomic expertise. And it’s hard to generalize, since each case has its own quirks. What happens to the microbiome depends on the particular kind of bacteria infecting people, the kind of antibiotics people take, the state of their microbiome beforehand, their own health, and even their own genes (well, the human genes, at least). And then there’s the question of how long these effects last. If there’s a change to the microbiome for a few weeks, does that change vanish within a few months? Or are there effects only emerge years later?

Scientists are only now beginning to get answers to those questions. In a paper just published online in the journal Gut, Andres Moya of the University of Valencia and his colleagues took an unprecedented look at a microbiome weathering a storm of antibiotics. The microbiome belonged to a 68-year-old man who had developed an infection in his pacemaker. A two-week course of antbiotics cleared it up nicely. Over the course of his treatment, Moya and his colleagues collected stool samples from the man every few days, and then six weeks afterwards. They identified the species in the stool, as well as the genes that the bacteria switched on and off.

What’s most striking about Moya’s study is how the entire microbiome responded to the antibiotics as if it was under a biochemical mortar attack. The bacteria started producing defenses to keep the deadly molecules from getting inside them. To get rid of the drugs that did get inside them, they produced pumps to blast them back out. Meanwhile, the entire microbiome powered down its metabolism. This is probably a good strategy for enduring antibiotics, which typically attack the molecules that bacteria use to grow. As the bacteria shut down, they had a direct effect on their host: they stopped making vitamins and carrying out other metabolic tasks.

In another intriguing response, the microbes dimmed their immune systems. To defend against invading viruses, bacteria deploy a collection of enzymes that recognize foreign genes and chop them up. As the bacteria dialed these enzymes down, they may have allowed viruses to infect them more easily. In some cases, the invasion led to their death. But in other cases, the viruses may have delivered them useful genes, including genes that let them resist the antibiotics.

Moya and his colleagues found that some types of bacteria were able to survive the onslaught of antibiotics, while others failed. As a result, the overall diversity of bacteria in the man’s gut changed from day to day over the course of his treatment. Before he started taking antibiotics, the scientists identified 41 species in a stool sample. By day 11, they only found 13. Six weeks after the antibiotics, the man was back up to 38 species. But the species he carried six weeks after the antibiotics did not represent that same kind of diversity he had before he took them. A number of major groups of bacteria were still missing."

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/18/when-you-swallow-a-grenade/