Mouth bacteria can change its diet

Some great information about metabolic community from a study at the Center for Infectious Disease at The University of Texas at Austin. Here they look at the change in metabolism in bacteria from healthy to disease states.

Whiteley found periodontitis interesting because it's one of the most prevalent diseases on the planet. "It's an interesting disease, because the same bacteria that are in your mouth when you're healthy are the same ones, more or less when you're sick," he said.

"What our study says is that it doesn't really matter what bacteria you have, because the communities are acting very similarly," Whiteley explained. "So a healthy community has this metabolism, no matter what the members are. And a diseased community has a very different metabolism, no matter what the members are. It's this conservation of a metabolic community. "

Whiteley compared what's happening under our gums to an ecosystem in the African savannah. The interactions among 'animals' is key. "You have lions, and you have leopards, and wildebeest, and all of these animals that are there. If you look at it as a whole community, it kind of makes sense. But if you were to only take a one-acre plot out of the African savannah and look at it, it may not make sense because there may not be a lion in that one acre. So trying to understand interactions, you need to take a much larger, bigger context. And that's what this study did," Whiteley explained.

"You can manipulate bacterial populations numerically very easily. You feed them something else. So you might be able to shift them back. These are some of the ideas that we've been thinking about in our lab that might be more pervasive as we move forward."

"Medicine is going to change a lot in the next 10 to 50 years. We're going to be thinking about these sort of questions a lot more, questions like what is your microbiome actually doing, and is that impacting why you're in the doctor's office," Whiteley said.

Mouth bacteria can change its diet, supercomputers reveal
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812163810.htm


Tweet