Antibiotics can cause pervasive, persistant changes to microbiota in... (t undiscovered health effects. When...)

Antibiotics can cause pervasive, persistant changes to microbiota in human gut

Date:11/18/2008

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"When you change the microbial population structure in the gut, you may affect how that population is keeping indigenous pathogens at manageable levels," says Sogin. Bacteria that do not normally cause problems, for example, may begin to grow more rapidly, and cause disease.

The study is part of a large, international effort to fully characterize the microbiota in the human gut, which is the highest-density natural bacterial ecosystem known. Up to 100 trillion microbial cells reside in the gut, and this community plays essential roles in nutrition, development, metabolism, pathogen resistance, and regulation of immune responses.

Until recently, descriptions of human-associated microbiota were constrained by techniques of cultivating (and thus identifying) bacteria. Less than 20-40% of the microbes in the human distal gut, for example, have been cultured in the laboratory. Since the late 1980s, however, cultivation-independent microbial surveys have been developed that identify community members by genetic sequencing. Sogin's technique, for example, which was used in this study, characterizes microbial populations by sequencing short, hypervariable regions of one gene common to all microbes, the 16S rRNA gene. This pyrosequencing technique reveals greater taxonomic richness in microbial samples at a fraction of the cost of traditional sequencing technologies.

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Contact: Diana Kenney
dkenney@mbl.edu
508-289-7139
Marine Biological Laboratory
Source:Eurekalert

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