The Summer 2019 issue of MIT Spectrum reports on the travels of several MIT post-doctoral students who traveled to Malaysia in search of microbiome samples from indigenous villagers of the Batek tribe.  Collecting the samples proved to be challenging, as skeptical villages unaccustomed to toilets, not to mention observers, were unwilling to  put their personal habits on display.  Fortunately an accommodation preserved the villagers' privacy while allowing the researchers to locate stool samples.

Although it sounds at first like an odd undertaking, the fact is that the Batek tribe living in the forest more than 250 miles from the capital in Kuala Lumpur offered a unique microbiome.  As nomadic hunter-gatherers, the Batek tribe's microbiomes are the result of a diet free from processed food, and untouched by the vaccines, antibiotics, and chemicals that affect the microbiomes of those living in the industrialized areas of the globe.  

The successfully harvested samples were taken to MIT's Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics (CMIT) for further study.  Launched in 2014, CMIT seeks to research the human microbiome to understand better its role in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases like Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.  


Source:  Halber, Deborah, "Going for the Gut," MIT Spectrum, Summer 2019 Issue, available at:  https://spectrum.mit.edu/summer-2019/going-for-the-gut/

Most everyone knows, or should know, that orally administered antibiotics destroy vast numbers of both the good and harmful bacteria that comprise the microbiome.  Recent research has shown that the microbiome is also vulnerable to more than two hundred other medications that are not specifically antibiotics, like blood pressure medication, antihistimines, and painkillers.

The research, undertaken by the European Melocular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, was made possible by new techniques that permit the culture of anaerobic bacteria that live only in the absence of oxygen -- like those in the microbiome.  

The research also found that the same bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics were also resistant to adverse effects from other medications.  An important revelation of this research is that antibiotic resistance can occur even when antibiotics are not used.  

For Crohn's Disease patients, this is important news.  Ensuring a healthy microbiome is an essential approach to ensuring that a dysbiosis in the microbiome -- a hallmark of a Crohn's Disease inflammation flare -- does not occur.  Knowing that many other medications, in addition to antibiotics, can adversely affect the microbiome is critically important. 

Source:  Maier, Lisa, et al., "Extensive Impact of Non-Antibiotic Drugs on Human Gut Bacteria," Nature 555, 623-628 (19 March 2018).