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Little life-forms inside your head!

A little bit of background

What in the world is ADHD you might ask? ADHD stands for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and it is a common mental disorder that is found in school-aged children, but can also affect many adults (Parekh et al. 2017)! Symptoms of ADHD include inattention, impulsivity, and/or hyperactivity. If you have ever driven a vehicle without power-steering, you might have experienced the vehicle steering less sharply than what was intended by the driver. Some people describe their experience of having ADHD as if their brain is doing this! With ADHD, you might find yourself having to put in a lot more effort in a specific task just to avoid going off of the road. Continue reading “Little life-forms inside your head!”

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Another One Bites the Dust: Kicking Asthma to the Curb

Background

In 2016, the CDC reported that 8.3% of children have asthma. Asthma is a chronic lung disease in which airways become inflamed and narrowed. The cause of asthma is unknown, but scientists suspect that genetics, infections as a child, and exposure to certain allergens or viruses may have an impact on one’s development of asthma. There is no cure for this disease, although there are medicines that can help reduce an asthmatic person’s symptoms. (NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)

Previous research has shown that children who grow up on traditional dairy farms have an apparent protection from asthma due to high levels of microbial exposure (Ege et al 2011). The problem is that researchers have been unable to define the exact effect that these microbes have on the immune systems of dairy farm children. Stein et al (2016) developed a protocol that would hopefully bridge the gap of the causes and effects of the dairy farm lifestyle and immunity against asthma. Continue reading “Another One Bites the Dust: Kicking Asthma to the Curb”

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Moms and Microbiomes: Making the Breast(feeding) Decision

Background

Parents want to know the best ways to protect and maintain their child’s health. Most parents have strong opinions about the best way to ensure their child stays healthy. The decision to breastfeed or use formula is just one example of a highly controversial parenting choice in recent years. Another very contested issue is the maternal diet during pregnancy, which has been found to have lasting impacts on the child’s health. Continue reading “Moms and Microbiomes: Making the Breast(feeding) Decision”

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Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria in the Human Water Cycle

Image provided by International Water Association

Background:
About 70% of the planet is covered in water with about 60% of your body being made up of water. Lakes, rivers, and reservoirs contain some of the most diverse and abundant communities of bacteria according to a 16S rRNA gene study by Tamames et al. (2010). Our own microbiota interact daily with these different communities as we drink, bathe, and excrete bacteria. One of the more pressing issues in today’s modern medicine is antibiotic resistant bacteria that are becoming increasingly hard to treat. Antibiotic resistance is caused by evolution of bacteria, which is the bacteria gaining antibiotic genes that increase its fitness. In the presences of antibiotics, bacteria that are lacking a resistance mutation die, whereas bacteria with immunity to antibiotics have a higher survival rate. These antibiotic resistant bacteria then pass on that resistance to antibiotics to the next generation, as well as potentially other bacteria through lateral gene transfer, which is the transfer of genetic material between a parent and daughter bacteria. Continue reading “Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria in the Human Water Cycle”

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For the microbiomes of our future

Picture of a baby with bacteria visualized on it.
University of Utah (Learn Genetics)

The vaginal microbiome:  We live in a world of microbes, and yet we are still learning new things about these millions of ‘germs’ every day and how they influence us, but what about our children? New research suggests a mother’s stress during pregnancy could be another puzzle piece in the development of baby’s microbiome and brain. According to the CDC nearly 4 million children were born in the United States in 2016, which resulted in mothers giving their offspring microbes, whether the baby was born through c-section or vaginally. Recent research (Rutayisire et al., 2016) is starting to show that there may be an advantage to birthing vaginally, as young are exposed to their mother’s microbiome. Continue reading “For the microbiomes of our future”

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How Does Your Microbe Community Change During Pregnancy?

Background

The vaginal microbiota undergoes major compositional changes throughout a women’s lifespan from birth, to puberty, to menopause. However, very little is known about the composition of the vaginal microbiota throughout these transitional stages (Romero 2014). So if the microbial community of the vagina changes throughout a women’s life, how does pregnancy change it, if it does at all? Continue reading “How Does Your Microbe Community Change During Pregnancy?”

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How the gut microbiome is impacted: Patients with stage 4 hepatitis C virus

Background:

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a liver infection that is a worldwide major health problem. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), they estimated approximately 71 million people in the world with chronic HCV. In this blog I will be focusing more on chronic HCV and how it affects our gut microbiome. There are many different genotypes of the virus, and sadly there is still no pre-exposure prophylaxis available to this day but there is currently much research being done on HCV (CDC, 2018). Following the chronic infection, most people will develop cirrhosis or liver cancer. A large portion of the people who die from HCV die because they have already entered the terminal stages of cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma. Cirrhosis is a serious disease that occurs once liver cells are damaged with scar tissue, when the organ starts to fail the patient will die unless they receive a liver transplant (CDC, 2018). Hepatocellular carcinoma is a type of cancer that is correlated with hepatitis C virus, hepatitis B virus, heavy drinking, iron storage diseases or aflatoxin (CDC, 2018). The most common sources of HCV infection are by injection drugs, using contaminated needles, and transfusions of blood that has not been tested for blood pathogens. Throughout the years there has been a significant amount of research on the role of gut microbiota in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and liver cirrhosis, but there is not much research on chronic hepatitis C and the human microbiome. This is because most of the other research focuses on how alcohol affects the liver. Continue reading “How the gut microbiome is impacted: Patients with stage 4 hepatitis C virus”

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The Connection Between Our Personalities and Our Gut Microbes

Image provided by vrx/Shuttestock via Shape.

Background

Personality, according to the American Psychological Association, refers to “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving’. In short, it’s what makes us us, what makes me different from you. It shapes how we process and understand our individual lives and all the nuances they bring, and in turn those experiences also shape our personality.

Though it may have seemed obvious, there have been recent findings that personality could play a larger role than we may have thought in determining an individual’s health. For example, Youyou et al found computer-based personality judgements could predict an individual’s physical health or even if they’re more prone to substance use (Youyou et al 2015). Continue reading “The Connection Between Our Personalities and Our Gut Microbes”

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Attention Deficit in Teenage Boys: Who Would’ve Guessed?

A Brief Background

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, also known as ADHD, is one of the most prevalent psychiatric diseases in childhood adolescence across the globe (Polanczyk et al, 2005). Children with ADHD find difficulties with their inattention, hyperactivity, and/or inability to control their impulses. These lifelong symptoms are caused by numerous neurotransmitter systems and various brain functions. Prenatal conditions such as low birth weight, prematurity, and prenatal exposure to alcohol and/or other toxins are external risk factors. The socioemotional environment during postnatal development and food constituents/micronutrients can also contribute to ADHD symptom severity (Capusan et al, 2005). There are many risk factors in early development associated with ADHD, such as delivery method, gestational age, type of feeding, maternal health, and early-life stressors, all of which have an effect on the gut microbiota of patients with ADHD. Continue reading “Attention Deficit in Teenage Boys: Who Would’ve Guessed?”

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When Environments Change

Can Algae save the world?

In today’s world with an increasing human footprint across the natural world, scientists believe we may be entering a sixth mass extinction. Fragmented habitats, introduction of invasive species, and climate change are just some of the factors leading to this mass extinction.  A lot of species still have yet to be recorded, so the number of extinctions of populations and species documented by scientists are likely to be large underestimates (Barnosky et al. 2011).  Climate change is one factor among many that is leading to the loss of biodiversity. Therefore, it is important for scientists to understand how populations respond to rapid environmental change. It is known that evolutionary history may affect risk of extinction within populations due to the accumulation of mutations, or pleiotropy. In one environment certain mutations will be favored, but in others they may have detrimental effects that reduce fitness, or reproductive success of a certain genotype in a population. (genotype being the genetic makeup of an individual) This would lower a population’s ability to withstand environmental change due to the accumulation of mutations which aren’t suited for the new environment. (MacLean et al. 2004) Understanding evolutionary history is crucial for understanding how populations will respond to environmental change caused by climate change. In the October edition of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology there was a study looking at how evolutionary history affects extinction probability.  Its title is “The effect of selection history on extinction risk during severe environmental change’. This study looked at how the extinction risk of populations of the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii changed with various stressful environments (Lachapelle et al. 2017).

Continue reading “When Environments Change”