What are the consequences of the disappearing human microbiota?
by Martin J. Blaser and Stanley Falkow
in Nature Reviews Microbiology doi:10.1038/nrmicro2245
Who are we? From prions and organelles up through neighborhoods and nation-states, we are groups of groups of groups. In this thoughtful, provocative paper Blaser and Falkow remind us that 90% of our cells are non-human. Vertebrates [...]
Read Full Post »
Sanitizing the hygiene hypothesis:
Health lessons from human co-evolution with microorganisms
Report from a Workshop led by
Kathleen Barnes, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and
Erika von Mutius, Professor of Pediatrics, University Children’s Hospital, Munich
One of five workshops in a conference on
Evolution and Diseases of Modern Environments
Organized by Randolph Nesse, at the Berlin Charité, October 13-14, 2009
In conjunction [...]
Read Full Post »
In 2005 Sarkis Mazmanian and colleagues showed that a single polysaccharide from an intestinal commensal, Bacteroides fragilis, could largely correct the subnormal and functionally distorted development of the immune system that occurs in germ-free mice (Mazmanian et al. 2005). More recently they have shown, using three different models of intestinal inflammation, that the same polysaccharide, [...]
Read Full Post »
