Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a new class of virus-like organisms in the human gut microbiome. If confirmed, the next step will be to figure out whether these strange creatures are beneficial or harmful to human health.
It's crazy," Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was not involved in the study, he told Science. "The more we watched, the crazier we saw. ”
Background: There are trillions of microbes in your digestive tract, and usually, that's a good thing – some of these little free-riders help you stay healthy by producing vitamins, aiding food digestion, and controlling harmful bacteria.
But if the balance of these microbes (collectively known as the "gut microbiome") is disrupted, it can make you sick — scientists have found a correlation between an unbalanced microbiome and a higher risk of developing diseases like diabetes, cancer, mood disorders, and more.
WHAT'S NEW? The more we know about the gut microbiome, the more powerful we are to change it to improve our health. A team led by Stanford University has just made a potentially significant discovery with the discovery of a completely new class of gut organisms.
They called these creatures "obelisks," and they found them in bacteria extracted from the human intestines and mouths. They also appear to be fairly common, with researchers analysing 7% of samples of gut bacteria and 50% of samples of oral bacteria.
It's not something sporadic or isolated in the population – it does affect quite a few samples," Joan Marquez-Molins, a molecular biologist at Uppsala at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, told Nature
The details are as follows: According to the ** shared by the researchers on the preprint server Biorxiv, the obelisk resembles a "virus-like". These tiny RNA loops can infect other organisms, just like viruses, but because they lack protein coding, they do not have the characteristic protein coat of a virus.
Viroids are found in plants, but newer research suggests that they can also infect bacteria and other organisms, so the Stanford team has developed a tool to search RNA sequence databases for viruses that may form loops, hoping to find more viroids.
This led to the discovery of a sequence of nearly 30,000 bases that was too few to be an RNA virus. Like viroids, they lack codes to create protein coats, but unlike viroids, these sequences include codes for other proteins. The team named them "Obelisks".
I'm really impressed with this approach," Simon Roux, a computational biologist at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, told Science magazine, who was not involved in the study. "The author is really creative. ”
Looking ahead: This research still needs to be confirmed through peer review, but if the Stanford team discovers something new but so prevalent in the human gut, the next step will be to figure out what, if any, effects it has on human health.
I think this work makes it clearer that we're still exploring the frontiers of this viral universe," Roux said.