I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong describes the animal microbial interactions that alter and sometimes control our health and behavior.

The effort to describe microbes as either good or bad over simplifies these organisms. A better analogy would be that the microbes could either be a weed or a wildflower depending on the location. The standard gut microbes aid with digestion but are problematic if they enter the bloodstream.

Insect microbial interactions involve complex trade offs. Some provide protection to aphids from parasitic wasps. Other bacteria Janthionobacterium lividum can help frogs ward off infections from fungal organisms like Batrachochytrium dendrobatis (Bd). Researchers noted that Bd was spreading into the area and then dipped susceptible frogs in the bacterial broth allowing some of the species to survive the fungal invasion.

Researchers are trying to replicate the success of fecal transplants with C. difficile for other diseases with mostly poor to mixed results. Other fecal transplants can cause changes in animal behavior. Demonstrating this effect in humans is difficult but may have some implications with susceptibility to mental illness.

The success of introduced probiotics is currently limited to reducing the adverse side effects from antibiotic treatments. With a normal gut microbiome researchers have had difficulty altering the gut microbiome using probiotics. The low number of organisms in the probiotic compared to the number in the gut makes it difficult. Food prebiotics such as mother's breast milk, onions, bananas, garlic and other can successfully change the gut micribiome.

We live in a community of microorganisms. Attempting to make things better by using a broad spectrum antibiotic has the potential to cause other problems. Billions of years ago the merging of archaea and bacteria produced the first eukaryotes as noted by Eugene V. Koonin in 2015.

Can a fungus save plants from Global Warming - 8 min.

 

A world without microbes - 7 min.

The microbes within us - 47 minutes