Researchers want to create a frozen ark for useful germs: goats and sodas: NPR

Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello had just moved to New York when Hurricane Sandy arrived from the Atlantic and shook the East Coast.

She learned that the labs of New York University where she was working – and her freezer – were out of power. So she ran to the failing freezer, took samples of microbiota that she had collected as a researcher in Puerto Rico over the past 14 years and stored them elsewhere.

The microbiota is the bacterium that colonizes the human body – intestine, skin, mouth, etc. – which often helps regulate your health. Researchers call them "beneficial germs".

Dominguez-Bello's colleagues were not so lucky: many researchers lost samples that took years to collect.

She now has an idea of ​​how to protect these samples from disasters. She is part of a team that wants to build a vault for the freezer in the safest place possible and store it with the microbiota collected by scientists around the world – a kind of Noah's ark for them. useful bacteria.

Thursday at Science, the team proposed a plan to collect and safeguard the microbiota in one place.

"The immune systems are formed by bacteria," says Dominguez-Bello, lead author of the proposal and professor in the department of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers-New Brunswick and at the department of anthropology. The bacteria help the immune system identify germs that pose a threat and those that are healthy – and they can help our body fight disease.

Some studies suggest that a diverse microbiota – a wide variety of these helpful bacteria – could be beneficial for your overall health. A lack of microbiota diversity has been associated with immune diseases such as diabetes, asthma, allergies and more.

But modern life is not favorable to the microbiota. Studies have shown that antibiotics are becoming more commonplace, that our diet is changing and that we are regrouping in modern cities, our microbiota is diversifying. Researchers therefore want to store – and study – the good seeds of remote communities that have had little contact with modern medicine.

The inhabitants of these communities have a different microbiota and are much more varied than the microbes of urban communities. But as the inhabitants of isolated areas have more contact with the outside world, this diversity fades away.

Dominguez-Bello says in his work: "I'm trying to understand: what have we lost?"

This work can lead to better probiotics – microorganisms introduced into the body through supplements to strengthen our immune system. One of the challenges is to convince these good sprouts to stay in our modern guts.

That's why it's important to preserve microbiota samples collected by researchers, says Dominguez-Bello.

The idea of ​​a safe protects important samples from a catastrophic change. In Norway, the Svalbard Seed Bank ensures the rapid disappearance of plant biodiversity during natural and man-made disasters by keeping seeds stored in cold storage.

Dominguez-Bello suggests that the microbiota bin could also be installed in Norway or perhaps in Switzerland.

"The collection must be really isolated, the coldest and the most autonomous possible [place] possible, so if a major disaster occurs, the collection can survive, "she says.

"We want a cold place in a stable country – it is very important that the country is politically neutral and stable."

The cold would mean that you would need less energy to keep the frozen samples, and if the vault starts to fail for any reason, the natural cold would slow the thaw.

The backup collection would be a kind of bank. you can only withdraw what you have deposited. Individual researchers sent copies of their samples to keep them in a safe place.

There is another advantage to such an installation. The collection could bring together scientists who want to share samples and collaborate.

Alexis Mosca, pediatric gastroenterologist at Robert Debré hospital in Paris, considers the collection as "a brilliant and original idea".

Mosca, who was not associated with the proposal, studied the gut microbiota and the potential benefits of reintroducing various microbes into the human body.

"Restoring a healthy microbiota may require sowing our microbiota with useful" old "species," says Mosca. The "old" species, closer to the beneficial bacteria of our ancestors, could come from isolated communities that researchers are studying.

At present, many of our probiotics are made from bacteria from cows and other animals. But microbes found in cows are often different from those rooted in humans, says Dominguez-Bello. We do not know how beneficial they are. She says more research needs to be done to determine what works and why.

According to Dominguez-Bello, in the future, probiotics will probably come from humans. People can start backing up their own microbiota samples before surgery, she says. After antibiotic treatment, they could reintroduce their useful bacteria to keep their immune system flourishing.

This already occurs, to some extent, with stool transplants in patients with life-threatening diseases that can be repaired by adjusting their microbiota.

The next step for the bacterial arch, she says, will be to create guidelines for submitting samples – and keeping them.

And then comes the fundraiser.

"We need money for the facilities and to pay the salaries of the people there and the transportation of the samples, etc.," she said.

Melody Schreiber (@m_scribe on Twitter) is an independent reporter in Washington, D.C.