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>> Did you know we have 10 times as many microbes that live in and on us as our human cells?
That is to say, we have 3 to 5 pounds of microbes that live in our gut.
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You might think this is scary but it's actually very, very important.
Our collection of microbes is called our microbiome.
It's our bacteria, it's our viruses, it's the fungi and they're normally very healthy,
happy things.
When you eat yogurt, you're actually eating microbes.
And these actually make a very healthy flora, if you will, that inhabits our gut.
It's also on our skin and everywhere in our body.
This is very crucial for our health because the gut microbiome, for example, it basically
digests our food, it makes essential vitamins we, ourselves, can't make, and basically controls
our nutrition.
So the net result is that your microbiome is just super important for your health.
Direct links have been made between the microbiome and diabetes, also obesity, and things like
inflammatory bowel disease.
It's also been suggested to have an effect on other things, like depression, autism,
anything you can imagine, and that's because your microbiome is making incredible metabolites,
some of which may ultimately control your behavior, although we don't really understand
this very well.
So there's a lot of investigation to do to be able to understand these links between
your microbiome, your food and your behavior.
There's a key metabolite that's been implicated in heart attacks that's made by your microbiome.
So people who eat a lot of red meat make something called carnitine.
That gets converted into a compound called TMAO and TMAO has actually been associated
with heart attacks in humans.
And it's your microbiome that converts the carnitine into TMAO.
So by trying to control people's microbiome, we hope to be able to actually control people's
health, not only for things like diabetes and obesity, but also for things you wouldn't
necessarily have guessed, like heart attacks.
Understanding the microbiome will be hugely important for understanding and managing space
travel.
With the twin astronauts, we're going to see what kinds of changes occur as people get
blasted off through space and as they live in space for a long period of time.
This will be very important when people go on multiyear missions to Mars and other places.
But by understanding how these changes occur, we should be able to control people's diet
or maybe even take probiotics that would actually affect their microbiome and help manage people's
health better as they go on these long and stressful journeys.
The microbiome is an important part of the omics puzzle.
It's something you can control through diet and probiotics and it's very valuable then
for not only managing folks in space but also for people here on earth.