So I’ve been doing a lot of reading about poop lately.
Now before you say, “Ew!” or “Dude, wtf?!” Don’t be such a girl! You see I’m very much justified in this journey into fecal fun! My postdoc adviser is interested in expanding her research to understand the world of microbial critters housed in our guts. And as the postdoc, it’s a part of my training to learn something new, develop a project, and attempt not to let my stupidity show (too much). I’m sure you can recall learning in primary school and beyond about how there are billions of tiny microscopic organisms crawling on our bodies and living inside of us right? (I know I do, and this really freaked me out as a kid. I immediately felt things crawling all over me). We call these harmless critters commensal bacteria. If you were paying attention that day in science class you probably also remember your teacher talking about symbiotic and parasitic relationships too, but because I’m still stupid in these areas, I won’t go into too much depth on the differences between these three relationships. We will stick to the basics and just say, Symbiosis=Good, Commensalism= Neutral and Parasitism=You Die. No seriously, if you have a parasite you should probably stop reading and go directly to the ER.
All joking aside, researchers and smart people have recently taken an interest in this shit. By studying poop, we can find out a lot about what kinds of microbial communities are living inside of our intestine. The more diverse the community, the better our health outcomes are (apparently). Interestingly enough these smart people keep discovering ways to make science even more complicated. Technology has advanced to the point that now we can not only identify the strains of bacteria inside of us, we can profile and classify these organisms into operational taxonomic units (OTUs), which are used to place bacteria into categories based on their similarities and likely functionalities, cuz get this! The gut microbiome has the ability to influence host metabolism, susceptibility to disease and a slew of other things that are beyond my current understanding.
Gut microbiota, or microbes housed in our bellies are capable of breaking down and digesting the foods we cannot. There’s this one group of smart people out there who call these foods fermentable carbs. When our little buddies have their turn to eat, they produce a number of by-products that we (the host) can absorb. To avoid further complicating things we will simply say that some of these microbial metabolites (ooo fancy) are beneficial in regulating a number of processes in the human organism. Some researchers say these by-products have anti-cancer functions, regulate immune response, and even regulate inflammatory processes. Since my background is in cancer epigenetics, I’m primarily interested in shedding my stupidity with hopes of finding and understanding an epigenetic linkage between the gut microbiome, the resulting metabolites and their effects on the expression of oncogenes and tumor suppressors (ooo, more fancy words). And yea, that last link does one hell of a job explaining wtf cancer epigenetics is (note the sarcasm).
WARNING! LONG DIVERGENCE...
You know how we’ve got all these complicated things going on in our bodies? Well our DNA contains the code for all of that complicated junk. In some cases of cancer there is a mutation that occurs that results in the code getting screwed up, and a gene that’s supposed to be the bouncer at the door goes missing so the whole club gets in for free past 11 when it was supposed to be ladies only before 10. In other cases the code is fine, but the shape and structure of DNA and its associated chromatin is janky. If the shape isn’t right (there are enzymes that regulate this, and in cancer these enzymes are aberrantly expressed resulting in too much methylation or too little acetylation), certain genes end up getting turned off when they aren’t supposed to, and others end up getting turned on when they aren’t supposed to. So it’s kinda like having the bouncer at the door, but his wires got caught up with the drunk dude slurring his speech, and a group of people snuck through the door when he wasn’t looking. Yea…
I hope you learned something new, and I will continue to share what I’ve learned as I learn it. We stupid scientists have to stick together!