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Bacteria are omnipresent, from the greasy handrail that you touched this morning to the bottom of the seabed, not to mention the trillion dollars live happily along your intestinal tract. However, it has long been thought that the brain of a healthy human being is a safe haven away from the bacterial world.
Now, a potentially revolutionary research indicates that there are bacteria in our brain, a discovery that could have really mind-blowing implications. If this preliminary research is about money, it could explain the apparent effect of intestinal bacteria on our brain function, behavior and emotions.
A team of neurobiologists from the University of Alabama presented their preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.
The idea of healthy brains carrying their own microbiota was adopted floating for a whileHowever, scientists have never been able to find solid evidence. In this research, they examined samples of 34 human post-mortem brains – half of which belonged to people with schizophrenia, according to Science – and discovered that everything brains contained varying amounts of rod-shaped bacteria. Most of the bacteria were localized in the substantia nigra, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, and a smaller number in the striatum.
The researchers then analyzed a number of brains from sterilized mice, which they treated in exactly the same way, and concluded that there was no bacterial contamination. . This suggests, although it is not definitively, that the human brain did not contain bacteria because of contamination after death.
Most intriguingly of all perhaps, the bacteria were the same types that you expect to find in the intestine, such as Firmicutes, Proteobacteria and Bacteroides.
The detection of bacteria in the brain is particularly curious because of the blood-brain barrier, a fortress of cells located near the blood vessels of the brain that protects it from unwanted invaders. If a pathogen, such as a bacterium, manages to cross this barrier, it can result in life-threatening inflammation. The newly discovered bacteria, however, do not seem to have such an effect.
"Interestingly, there was no structural evidence of inflammation in any of the brains examined," the researchers wrote in a summary for the presentation. "It is currently difficult to determine the route of entry of bacteria into the brain, but evidence of their presence in the axons and at the level of the blood-brain barrier corroborates previous speculations."
So how did the bacteria enter the brain? Are they from the intestines? Do they affect brain activity? Scientists are not sure of these issues as it is still too early for research. Nevertheless, with further research on the so-called "cerebral microbiome", they hope to open the door of the deeply mysterious relationship between bacteria, our guts and our brain.
[H/T:[H/T:[H/T:[H/T:Science]
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