How we study the microbes living in your gut | Dan Knights

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🗓️ 10 July 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

There are about a hundred trillion microbes living inside your gut -- protecting you from infection, aiding digestion and regulating your immune system. As our bodies have adapted to life in modern society, we've started to lose some of our normal microbes; at the same time, diseases linked to a loss of diversity in microbiome are skyrocketing in developed nations. Computational microbiologist Dan Knights shares some intriguing discoveries about the differences in the microbiomes of people in developing countries compared to the US, and how they might affect our health. Learn more about the world of microbes living inside you -- and the work being done to create tools to restore and replenish them.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features computational microbiologist Dan Nights, recorded live at TEDMed 2017.
0:09.1	If I asked you to name a microbe that's living in your gut, many of you would probably say e-coli.
0:18.5	A lot of people say this. It's the best known of the gut microbes. But it turns out
0:23.0	that E. coli is outnumbered in your gut about a thousand to one by other species, many of which
0:30.9	you probably haven't heard of. These are bacteriities. Previtella is another example. Those are
0:36.9	the two that dominate the modern human gut. There are about
0:40.9	a hundred trillion microbes living inside you. We call this your microbiome. So it's like a little
0:50.0	world living inside you, actually more like a universe. A hundred trillion means if you took a blade of grass and planted it for every
0:58.4	microbe living in your gut, that could fill a million football fields.
1:02.5	So it's incredibly complex.
1:04.1	But interestingly, as our bodies have been adapting to life in modern society, we're losing some of our normal microbes.
1:14.8	And at the same time, there are quite a few diseases related to the gut that are skyrocketing
1:23.3	in developed nations all around the world. And many of you probably know someone who suffers from obesity, diabetes,
1:32.9	Crohn's disease are all sort of colitis, allergies, and asthma.
1:37.3	Every one of these diseases and many others related to metabolism and autoimmunity
1:42.4	are linked to a loss of healthy diversity in the gut.
1:48.7	My lab got our first indication of this when actually we were studying non-human primates.
1:54.9	We wanted to find out what happens to a monkey's microbiome when they move from the jungle to a zoo. Does their microbiome change?
2:06.4	Do they pick up new bugs? Do they lose some? Does it get better or worse? We tracked two
2:11.2	different species in the jungle, and one in Vietnam, one in Costa Rica, and then we sequenced the DNA from their stool. This is how we
2:21.0	study the microbiome in my research lab. And what we found in the DNA is that in the wild,
2:28.1	these two species had totally different sets of microbes. It was like a fingerprint for the species.
	...

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