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Cool talk alert: Learn about the mysteries of the human microbiome

Tonight at Genspace, NYU researcher Dr. Deepshika Ramanan will dive into the secret world of our guts.

There are 10 bacteria cells for every human cell in our bodies (bacteria is smaller). (Photo courtesy of Genspace)

There’s a universe of bacteria living in our guts and science knows little about it, save that it affects us a lot and that we don’t really understand it.
That’s changing. In recent years, the study of the human microbiome, as it’s called, has taken off. Tonight at Downtown Brooklyn’s Genspace, NYU researcher Dr. Deepshika Ramanan will dive into the secret world of our guts.
“It is known as commensalism when one organism benefits from another without affecting it,” according to Genspace. “In this case, the human organism is benefitting from bacteria. These commensal bacteria help us develop our immune system, digest and absorb food, and even prevent the colonization of otherpathogenic bacteria, or bacteria that cause disease.”
Perhaps the best thing written on this topic was a 2015 article in The New Yorker called “The Excrement Experiment,” which delved into the world of gut microbes and the only quasi-legal practice of poop transfusions, or fecal microbiota transplantation, as it’s officially known.
The promise of this treatment is shocking, and the power of the bacteria within us to regulate everything from weight to mood, is immense. From the article:

It’s possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy. Evidence is mounting that over the course of human history the diversity of our microbes has diminished, and, in a recent paper, Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, microbiologists at Stanford, argue that the price of microbial-species loss may be an increase in chronic illness. Unlike our genes, which have remained relatively stable, our microbiome has undergone radical changes in response to shifts in our diet, our antibiotic use, and our increasingly sterile living environments, raising the possibility that “incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise.” In particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food. Research in mice suggests that those by-products help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. Noting that rates of so-called Western diseases—including heart disease and autoimmune disorders, all of which involve inflammation—are thought to be much lower in traditional societies, the Sonnenburgs write, “It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases.”

Fascinating stuff. Learn more tonight.

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Companies: Genspace
Series: Brooklyn
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