20151214 - microbiome

How the microbiome shapes our world

Brooke Borel

Plus: Why you shouldn’t give probiotics to your dog.

You are never really alone. On your skin, in your nose, in every inch of your personal space, you are accompanied by trillions of tiny organisms. Collectively, these microorganisms are known as the microbiome — the complex ecosystem of microbes that share and shape our world. Yet the quest to understand the microbiome is still in its infancy. What’s the role of the microbiome in human health and wellbeing? How are you affected by the small rainforest of microorganisms that live in every office building, or the collection of microbes in your gut? Science is just beginning to figure that out — and the research will blow your mind.
We invited three scientists to talk about what interested them most about the current microbiome research. Read on for insights from microbiologist Jonathan Eisen (TED Talk: Meet your microbes) evolutionary biologist Rob Knight (read about his 2014 TED Talk), and ecologist and TED Fellow Jessica Green (We’re covered in germs. Let’s design for that).

Research into microbiomes seems to have hit critical mass in the last few years. Why is that?
Jonathan Eisen: I think there are five or six different related things all happening at the same time. At least some of it is technology — our ability to study microbial communities has gotten better. There has also been pioneering work on human-associated microbial communities. We’ve learned that they play a profound role in various aspects of human health and disease.
 

----the microbial communities in our buildings, in our cars, in our planes, in our hospitals, are all affecting our health.-----

A third, and maybe fourth, area, are related just to general malaise about the human genome. We spent two billion dollars sequencing the genome — or the government did — and there was this promise that we were going to understand human biology simply from analyzing the genome. But that didn’t work out exactly as we hoped.
And then everybody tried to come up with another way to explain human biology that wasn’t the genome. So there’s been a lot of hype and hope in the epigenome, de novo somatic mutations, and the microbiome. If the genome doesn’t explain everything, a really nice alternative explanation is that on top of the genome, the patterns of microbial communities that people have in and on them may explain a lot of the variation that we see.........................


 http://ideas.ted.com/its-all-around-us-three-scientists-on-how-the-microbiome-shapes-our-world/