We read across the press that in the future patients could get from their family doctor a personalized probiotic cocktail based on the analysis of their gut microbiota. Do you believe in such therapies?
Answer:
“I have to admit that today I’m rather skeptical regarding this possibility. I think there’s still a lot of research efforts to be made in order to understand the physiological impact of an imbalance of the gut microbiota, the mechanisms involved.”
This was a pretty good answer:
“You make conclusions and interpretations on the relations between a commensal bacteria and its host, its potential impact… then you ask yourself whether this concept is transferable to mammals. That is what we do with Lactobacillus plantarum. We observed an effect on juvenile growth with the Drosophila [fly]. That is a formal proof of impact of a bacteria on a physiological aspect of its host. Now we test whether those strains have an effect on mice models.”
That bacteria he mentioned is one found in both mice and humans.
If a mouse is born into a bacteria-free environment and no bacteria take hold it doesn’t grow as well. Noticeably so….. that is, until the introduction of the bacteria. Once the bacteria population takes hold in its intestines, the mouse starts growing and developing quite nicely.
Here’s an interesting one:
A few different teams found that a single strain of bacteria promoted growth as well as a full set of bacteria. This was found to be the case with 2 very different strains of bacteria. This “proves that biological functions provided by a bacterial community in your intestines are shared among community members and may be redundant.”
This is a fun one.
Your intestinal bacterial profile is one of 3 main types:
Bacteroides (enterotype 1)
Prevotella (enterotype 2)
Ruminococcus (enterotype 3)
They seem to be largely a result of long-term dietary habits, though it’s a hot topic rife with viscous debate. Going with the enterotype idea…. Bacteroides – animal protein. Prevotella – carbohydrates. Ruminococcus – cellulose.
One of the things Ruminococcus produces is Acetate, which seems to be one of those good anti-cancer compounds. That’s why we should go out and chew on sticks.
Long-term diet is strongly associated with the gut microbiome composition – those who eat plenty of protein and animal fats have predominantly Bacteroides bacteria, while for those who consume more carbohydrates the Prevotella species dominate.
That film you get on your teeth after you’ve had a day loaded with cookies and soda? Prevotella.
Gingivitis and periodontitis – that’s the Prevotella. It particularly likes simple sugars, and steroids help it grow.
http://ift.tt/1mV493D
http://ift.tt/1fkyL9z
http://ift.tt/UZtxXU
Gut bacteria population profiles change if you have cancer. Do these changes cause cancer? That’s still being worked on. Something that is known is that these changes seem to accelerate tumor growth when tumors are present. What’s that mean? Motivation to “eat well” 
http://ift.tt/1mAhjA4
It’s something discovered just this month.
When you eat food, your gut bacteria ferments it. So you digest the nutrients in your food as well as whatever the fermentation process produces. When your gut bacteria ferments fiber, one of the results is that your body has improved insulin and glucose levels.
http://ift.tt/1fdRSSD
This is a slide deck that outlines some of the theories on what’s going on in your intestines. The point is that while the food you eat contains compounds that affect how you feel emotionally (you take pills for that), the bacteria in your intestines create byproduct compounds that also influence how you feel.
CD71+ cells (white blood cells with the protein CD71 on their surace) – they suppress the immune response of surrounding white blood cells. Most of the white blood cells of a newborn are these cell until 3 weeks after birth.
Anyways, these cells affect other immune cells through an enzyme called arginase, which metabolizes the amino acid arginine.
Baby formulas contain small amounts of arginine. Sidney Morris, a biochemist from the University of Pittsburgh, said that it may be important to avoid fortifying them with extra arginine, lest it swamps the arginase activity of CD71+ cells, releases the immune system, and causes problems for the developing infants’ guts. Yeah, that’s right, you don’t want to infants under 3 weeks old to have a strong immune system. It would provoke loads of inflammation and a poor gut bacteria colonization result.
Morris also noted that people who suffer physical traumas, and those with cancer, often have higher levels of arginase and weaker immune systems. “Whether the precise mechanism of immunosuppression is the same or different in each of these circumstances remains to be determined,” he said.
http://ift.tt/19uEmMj
Cohabitating with a dog can increase the diversity of bacteria in house dust. When mice ate this bacteria-rich dust, it shifted the microbes in their guts towards species that prevented their immune systems from overreacting to airborne allergens. The team also showed that a single bacterial species could duplicate many of these benefits.
When they supplemented their rodents’ diet with Lactobacillus johnsonii alone, they saw much the same effects as feeding them dog dust: a restructured gut microbiome, less inflammation, and a weaker immune response to allergens. Supplementing the mouse diets with this lone species even prevented the rodents from overreacting to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—a common virus that infects the lower airways of many human infants and increases the risk of asthma.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38660/title/Dogs–Dust-Microbes–and-Allergies/
This study has “..shown that, at least in mice, this susceptibility is the work of special cells that actively suppress immune responses in newborns. This raises their risk of diseases, but it also creates a window during which helpful bacteria can colonize their guts.”
In newborn mice, a lot of their white blood cells have a protein on their surface called CD71, which suppresses the immune response of surrounding white blood cells.
When they are a week old, 66% of their white blood cells have this protein on them. A week later, 25% have the protein on them. By the third week, they look like adult mice in this regard.
There are detectable changes within 24 hours, but it takes much longer (more than 10 days, as noted in this study) to begin to alter the characteristic type, e.g. protein and animal fat (Bacteroides) versus carbohydrates (Prevotella).
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6052/105.abstract
Here is one result of a crazy observation made during a different study: Male rats fed a probiotic showed youthful levels of testosterone and intestinal inflammation. This study confirms that effect and briefly goes into how and why.
“Feeding of [one probiotic strain] was previously shown to … lower systemic inflammation.” The reason is that the surface of your intestines become less inflammed when this organism is around in sufficient population.
Generally speaking, your intestinal walls are unhappy when certain strains of bacteria are not present. This results in higher overall levels of inflammation (which increases horizontal gene transfer rates, chronic disease rates, and accelerated aging).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879365/
I was using PuTTY and I wanted to read the help file included when you download all PuTTY programs (from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html). I’m running Windows 8.1 and it doesn’t have Windows Help installed. You can get the standalone installer from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=40899
I have 10 40GB VMs now taking up a total of 70GB.
That’s data deduplication for you.
Windows Server2012r2 just did it. I’m running it on the host instance itself, and it…. just…. worked.
Just think – now those 128GB SSDs make sense 
Make that SSD disk be part of a storage space – a mirrored one. Then, once you get it all set up, you could duplicate all the VMs by just plugging in one or more additional SSDs and adding them to the storage space. This is also how you can do quick, effortless backups of, well, anything on your Windows Server 2012r2 instance – just add a disk to a mirrored storage pool and then yank it once it’s been synced up.
It’s a Windows Server 2008r2 VM running under Hyper-V 2012. I had allocated 256MB memory to it but set it to use dynamic memory, thinking it would grow as needed. Well, I don’t think it gives it more memory until after the OS has started up.
It stayed hung at “Applying Computer Settings” for so long that I created a checkpoint and just powered it down. I added more RAM and then it started up.
