Showing posts with label Eukaryotome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eukaryotome. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

This Month in Blastocystis Research (AUG 2015)

I would like to highlight a comment that we published in PLoS Pathogens, - a paper that is free for download here. It gained some attention on Twitter, and it was recently reviewed in the Faculty of 1000.

We basically highlight the tricky situation that we so often encounter in the field of clinical microbiology, namely the one in which all non-fungal organisms isolated from the human intestinal tract are being referred to collectively as 'parasites'. The word 'parasite' has a negative connotation, indicating that the organism exploits the host with detrimental effects on the host. While this is true for some ciliates, for instance Giardia, other ciliates may in fact be mutualists, which means that these organisms have adapted to a life within a host, providing the host with one or more advantages. One such example is seen in herbivores, where ciliates and flagallates break down cellulose.

In the clinical microbiology lab we face different types of organisms when dealing with stool samples: Giardia, Cryptosporidium and Entamoeba histolytica are considered true parasites, i.e. organisms benefitting from the environment of a host, at the expense of the host, and symptoms such as diarrhoea may develop, indicating host damage. Parasites such as Cryptospordium are usually infecting an individual for a short while, with immunity developing. Meanwhile, we also encounter eukaryotic organisms that are known to be able to colonise the intestine for a very long time, - decades, without being expelled by the host; Blastocystis belong to this group. For some reason it is as if the body 'tolerates' the presence of the organism. Maybe Blastocystis is good at evading local immune responses, or maybe the body wishes to 'keep' Blastocystis for some reason and so  developed a way to tolerate it... as I've hinted at before on this blog, maybe Blastocystis may assist us in one or more metabolic processes, for instance, either directly or indirectly, maybe by selecting for or influencing bacterial communities. Indeed, we recently found evidence of Blastocystis being specifically related to certain groups of bacteria, which, if confirmed, opens up for a whole new line of research, including the use of Blastocystis as a probiotic.

I know that this last sentence may sound harsh in some people's ears; nevertheless, most research involving Blastocystis so far has been quite static and unimaginative, and it's about time that food microbiologist and the like start taking an interest in the micro-eukaryotes that tend to be common and stable conolisers of our guts.

If YOU take an interest in this topic, I suggest you look up the articles cited below.

References and further reading:

Andersen LO, Bonde I, Nielsen HB, & Stensvold CR (2015). A retrospective metagenomics approach to studying Blastocystis. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 91 (7) PMID: 26130823

Lukeš J, Stensvold CR, Jirků-Pomajbíková K, & Wegener Parfrey L (2015). Are Human Intestinal Eukaryotes Beneficial or Commensals? PLoS Pathogens, 11 (8) PMID: 26270819

Parfrey LW, Walters WA, & Knight R (2011). Microbial eukaryotes in the human microbiome: ecology, evolution, and future directions. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2 PMID: 21808637

Scanlan PD, Stensvold CR, Rajilić-Stojanović M, Heilig HG, De Vos WM, O'Toole PW, & Cotter PD (2014). The microbial eukaryote Blastocystis is a prevalent and diverse member of the healthy human gut microbiota. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 90 (1), 326-30 PMID: 25077936

Friday, May 10, 2013

Cell Symposium: Microbiome & Host Health - Lisbon 2013

My colleagues from Statens Serum Institut and I are heading to Lisbon, Portugal, tomorrow morning to attend the Cell Symposium on Microbiome and Host Health (link may be really busy now).

We are bringing a poster displaying some of our work related to our GUT18S project: A Novel Approach For Eukaryotic Phylogenetic Interrogation Of Clinical Samples Using Next Generation Sequencing Of SSU rRNA Genes; a pdf version of the poster can be downloaded here.

The GUT18S work is partly funded by the Marie Curie Actions (FP7) program.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Waiting For The Human Intestinal Eukaryotome

We were lucky enough to have a paper accepted for publication in the ISME Journal (Nature Publishing Group) in which we call for data on the "human intestinal eukaryotome".

In the paper, we start out:

"Recent developments in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies have allowed culture-independent and deep molecular analysis of the microbial diversity in faecal samples, and have provided new insights into the bacterial composition of the distal gut microbiota. Studies of the microbiome in different patient groups using metagenomics or 16S rRNA gene sequencing are increasing our knowledge of how the microbiota influences health and disease. The majority of recent advances in our understanding of human microbiota structure and dynamic changes in disease were made through phylogenetic interrogation of small subunit (SSU) rRNA (Paliy and Agans 2012). However, until recently such studies have generally failed to include data on common eukaryotic, endobiotic organisms such as single-celled parasites and yeasts ('micro-eukaryotes'). This deficiency may strongly bias the interpretation of results and ignoring an entire kingdom of organisms is a major limitation of human microbiome studies."