Bacteria are fascinating little creatures.
Some make us sick, some make us well, some keep us happy or healthy.
So how do program them to do our bidding?
*make evil scheming face*
Inside of your gut trillions of bacteria are helping you digest food and keeping our gut
in tip-top shape.
Millions of years of evolution have molded these tiny organisms into specific jobs and
now science is taking it from here.
Because gut bacteria live inside all humans, the ability to program them could be a cornerstone
of a whole new kind of medicine.
You have problems with lactose?
We've got a bacteria for that.
Worried about obesity?
We've got a bacteria to help.
These little organisms already do so much that we don't completely understand, and now
by altering some of them we DO understand, scientists are hoping to develop new kinds
of therapy.
The hospital-acquired infection P. aeruginosa is a doozy of a bug that infects the lungs,
gut and bladder and creates a film of proteins, DNA,and sugars; called a biofilm.
That biofilm makes P. aeruginosa difficult to attack with traditional medicines, like
drugs.
But, in an ACS Synthetic Biology study from 2013, researchers found a new solution: recruit
a fellow infectious agent to side of light.
Some strains of E. coli cause dangerous infections and some don't, but because it's found in
nearly everyone's lower intestine, medical researchers took it and reprogrammed the bacteria
to fight P. aeruginosa!
This new synthetic E. coli is like a hunting dog, tracking down P. aeruginosa, and attacking
it's biofilm with enzymes and an antimicrobial peptide!
Boom!
Double agent!
And that's just the beginning, since they proved the efficacy of this new treatment,
another set of researchers want to create a toolkit for using gut bacteria moving forward.
Programming a bacteria isn't as easy as typing commands into a computer, though.
Scientists are basically inventing a whole new system of tools to make sure ONE, the
bacteria are even present in the gut, and TWO if they're doing what they're supposed
to do once all up inside you.
Using the retroviral DNA editing technique CRISPR -- we've talked about it on DNews before
-- researchers at MIT modified the DNA of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron; adding light-emitting
genes and instructions to glow if they come in contact with a certain diet.
46 percent of humans have bac-teroidees theta-iotao-micron in their bodies.
This gut microbe normally uses water to help our intestines break down non-digestible polysaccharides.
But this new synthetic form could be used to indicate when problems are starting in
our gut, or to treat those problems before they even happen!
Next steps are to see if these synthetic bacteria can live alongside their natural brethren
without causing trouble; and then test if they can survive in the wild -- in a real
gut.
Let's imagine a patient had inflammatory bowel syndrome, or c. diff; the researchers say,
using this toolkit, a synthetic gut bacteria might allow doctors to treat the problems
before they even show symptoms!
How would you know something was up?
Your poop would glow.
Weird, but AWESOME.
Programming bacteria is the future, so figuring out how it works is a real focus of science
right now.
But medical researchers aren't the only ones doing cool stuff.
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