Tag: Microbiome

I Have No Mouth, Yet Still I Scream

Apr 4, 2023• 1

BY KIM BELLARD

In light of the recent open letter from AI leaders for a moratorium on AI development, I’m declaring a temporary moratorium on writing about it too, although I doubt either one will last long (and this week’s title is, if you hadn’t noticed, an homage to Harlan Ellison’s classic dystopian AI short story). Instead, this week I want to write about plants. Specifically, the new research that suggests that plants can, in their own way, scream.

Bear with me.

To be fair, the researchers don’t use the word “scream;” they talk about “ultrasonic airborne sounds,” but just about every account of the research I saw used the more provocative term. It has long been known that plants are far from passive, responding to stimuli in their environment with changes in color, smell, and shape, but these researchers “show that stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be recorded from a distance and classified.” Moreover, they posit: “These informative sounds may also be detectable by other organisms.”

It should make you wonder what your houseplant is saying about you when you forget to water it or get a cat.

They basically tortured – what else would you call it? – plants with a variety of stresses, then used machine learning (damn – I guess I am writing about AI after all) to classify, with up to 70% accuracy, different categories of responses, such as too much water versus too little. Even plants that have been cut, and thus are dying, can still produce the sounds, at least for short periods. They speculate that other plants, as well as insects, may be able to “hear” and respond to the sounds.

DayTwo Scores $37M to Expand Microbiome-Based Personalized Nutrition Treatment for Diabetes

Aug 31, 2021

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

People with Diabetes can get ready to celebrate: “The ‘Era of Lancets’ is over.” Precision nutrition startup, DayTwo, is scaling up its microbiome-based program, which takes the guesswork (and finger pricks) out of Diabetes management by offering its members food predictions that identify how their bodies will respond to any food BEFORE they eat it. The startup just closed a fresh $37M in Series B funding (led by aMoon and Cathay Ventures) and is expanding the rollout of their fee-for-outcomes Diabetes program to health plans and large self-insured employers.

The science behind this has yielded DayTwo the largest gut microbiome dataset in the world, and years of empirical studies on exactly what happens in our bodies as our digestive systems process different foods. Josh Stevens, DayTwo’s President & Chief Commercial Officer, walks us through the research behind the offering, which uses a gut microbiome analysis to rank foods and food combinations based on how eating them will impact a person’s blood sugar – essentially revealing what foods will (or won’t) cause a member’s blood sugar to spike before they even take a bite.

Its 70,000+ members report lower A1C levels (1 point on average), sustained weight loss, and, probably most exciting, an ability to stick with the program because the app (and wrap-around telehealth support from registered dieticians) creates a completely bespoke diet that lets people learn how to eat their favorite foods and keep their blood glucose levels within range. Will this predictive approach really bring about the end of lancet-based blood glucose testing for Diabetes management? Josh says Diabetes remission is a goal made easier by this predictive approach, but how does it stack up to other food-as-medicine approaches out there? I have a gut-feeling that you’ll want to tune in and find out!

Make Some Microbe Friends

Jun 1, 2021

By KIM BELLARD

It’s the coolest story I’ve seen in the past few days: The New York Times reported how an Italian museum cleaned its priceless Michelangelo sculptures with an army of bacteria. As Jason Horowitz wrote, “restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.”

And you just want to kill them all with your hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps.

The Medici Chapel in Florence had the good fortune to be blessed with an abundance of works by Michelangelo, but the bad fortune to have had centuries of various kinds of grime building up on them. In particular, over time the corpse of one Medici “…seeped into Michelangelo’s marble, the chapel’s experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations…”

This is, I assume, why they tell you not to touch the art.

Scientists picked a bacteria — Serratia ficaria SH7, in case you’re taking notes – that ate the undesired grime without also eating the underlying marble. It wasn’t hazardous to humans either and didn’t create spores that might go elsewhere. “It’s better for our health,” one of the art restorers told NYT. “For the environment, and the works of art.”

The technique was a success, allowing the sculptures to look like they did centuries ago.

Using such bacteria to clean art has been around for at a decade, and not just for sculptures. Perhaps more surprising is bacteria isn’t just cleaning art, it’s also creating it; the American Society for Microbiology hosts an annual Agar Art Contest.

If you’re impressed by that, researchers are teaching bacteria to read, or at least to recognize letters. That’s not all they might learn to do. “For example, the framework and algorithm in our study can be used to facilitate the design of living therapeutics, such as targeted drug release systems based on engineered probiotic bacteria systems,” the researchers say.

The thing is, we not only don’t know what microbes do, or could do, but we have only a vague understanding how they surround us. That’s starting to change. We’ve known for some time that each of us has a unique microbiome (including mycobiome!). What we didn’t realize until recently was that each urban area has its own microbiome as well.

Quantum Theory of Health

Jan 30, 2020• 1

By KIM BELLARD

We’re pretty proud of modern medicine. We’ve accumulated a very intricate understanding of how our body works, what can go wrong with it, and what are options are for tinkering with it to improve its health. We’ve got all sorts of tests, treatments, and pills for it, with more on the way all the time.

However, there has been increasing awareness of the impact our microbiota has on our health, and I think modern medicine is reaching the point classical physics did when quantum physics came along.

Classical physics pictured the atom as kind of a miniature solar system, with well-defined particles revolving in definite orbits around the solid nucleus. In quantum physics, though, particles don’t have specific positions or exact orbits, combine/recombine, get entangled, and pop in and out of existence. At the quantum level everything is kind of fuzzy, but quantum theory itself is astoundingly predictive. We’re fooled into thinking our macro view of the universe is true, but our perceptions are wrong.

So it may be with modern medicine. Our microbiota (including both the microbiome and mycobiome) both provide the fuzziness and dictate a significant portion of our health.

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 17

Apr 16, 2018

Today Jessica DaMassa asks me about the microbiome, the Dev4Health conference & whether there are more female CEOs than there used to be. All in 2 minutes, plus a bit more with me defending myself from Bruce Greenstein’s wisecracks–Matthew Holt