Microbial Quotes

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.

Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.

Every day we live and every meal we eat we influence the great microbial organ inside us - for better or for worse.

The “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control,’ ” observed an elder statesman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness. It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence. It is in part this disconcerting feeling that makes the advances in the microbial sciences so exciting.

More specifically, he found that the consumption of thirty different plants in a given week was the greatest predictor of gut microbial diversity.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science.

Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.

Of course I'd long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn't much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that half the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often feels like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and tried to control my breathing. Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn't irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony.

Okay, but what about microbial disease? “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we’re killing are our protectors.” In fact, the twentieth-century war on bacteria—with its profligate use of antibiotics, and routine sterilization of food—has undermined our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. “For the first time in human history, it has become important to consciously replenish our microflora.” Hence the urgency of cultural revival. And

Well, since alcohol is anti-microbial, that is to say, deadly to germs, humans who drank that instead of water would die at a much lower rate from waterborne pathogens – which, prior to industrial water treatment and purification, were ubiquitous. And so the booze hounds would proliferate, out-surviving and out-reproducing the water-drinkers. Alcoholism may actually be an adaptation. Yes, that would mean the bugs on this planet have bred an entire race of booze hounds. Ain’t evolution a bitch?

One begins to see bacteria, not as individual species, but as a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world.

The enemy was the microbial world, and over the centuries, it has killed more people than all of man's wars combined.

There are more microbial cells in and on each of us than human cells. While

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

Sodium bicarbonate acts as a natural and safe antifungal agent, which when combined with iodine, covers the entire spectrum of microbial organisms.

A long time ago, on a world as close as shadow : a very different version of north america cradled a huge land-locked saline sea. This sea teemed with microbial life. All this served a single tremendous organism. And on this world, under a cloudy sky, the entirety of the turbid sea cackled with a single thought. I.... This thought was followed by another To what purpose?

The fact is that hundreds of trillions of microbial “invaders,” mostly in our gut, are absolutely necessary for our survival, and there are ten times more of them than cells in the human body. Because the body cannot survive without its microbes (collectively called the “microbiome”), they are the functional equivalent of any of our other vital organ systems. In (belated) recognition of the importance of the microbiome, humans and most other organisms are now properly defined as superorganisms (complex organisms composed of many smaller organisms). (Saey

So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone." "Right, but I wasn't worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange." "Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange." I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I'd taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn't brought it to Davis's house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth,

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we

The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now. Our friend Agnolo the Fat wrote: “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.” The essence of that account is of an epidemic destroying the very bonds of human society. When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell? And if parents abandoning children wasn’t destabilizing enough, other support elements in society were shattered by the justifiable fear of the pestilence. The natural human inclination to seek companionship and support from one’s neighbors was short-circuited. No one wanted to catch whatever was killing everybody. In an era when people congregating together was so much more important than it is in our modern, so-called connected world, people kept their distance from one another, creating one of the silent tragedies of this plague: that they had to suffer virtually alone.

They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.

we already know enough scientifically about our microbes and our bodies to enable us to alter our lifestyles, eating patterns and diets to suit our individual needs and improve our health. It is useful to think of your microbial community as your own garden that you are responsible for. We need to make sure the soil (your intestines) that the plants (your microbes) grow in is healthy, containing plenty of nutrients; and to stop weeds or poisonous plants (toxic or disease microbes) taking over we need to cultivate the widest variety of different plants and seeds possible. I will give you a clue how we do this. Diversity is the key.

An arcane microbial defense, devised by microbes, discovered by yogurt engineers, and reprogrammed by RNA biologists, has created a trapdoor to the transformative technology that geneticists had sought so longingly for decades: a method to achieve directed, efficient, and sequence-specific modification of the human genome.

Modern lifestyle habits have therefore primed your body for unhealthy microbial expansion. If there is no benefit to curtailing your carbon footprint or erecting levees against the equivalent to rising oceans in your body, what can you do to turn the tide against microbial expansion and invasion? Thankfully, you can do plenty.

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease.

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

nine of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99 percent of the DNA we’re carrying around belongs to those microbes. Some scientists, trained in evolutionary biology, began looking at the human individual in a humbling new light: as a kind of superorganism, a community of several hundred coevolved and interdependent species.

Plants themselves deliver glyphosate to their microbial helpers, as was found in soybeans that exuded the herbicide from their roots for several weeks after being sprayed. Delivering a broad-spectrum antibiotic to the rhizosphere—the home for microbial communities that provide nutrients to plants and keep pathogens at bay—is not exactly a recipe for improving soil health, crop health, or the nutrient density of food.

Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.

Tu pierzi inca vremea cu lucrurile astea, Lenu? Noi zburam peste o minge de foc. Partea care s-a racit pluteste pe lava. Pe aceasta parte construim blocurile, podurile si strazile. Din cand in cand, lava iese din Vezuviu sau provoaca un cutremur care distruge totul. Exista microbi peste tot care te fac sa te imbolnavesti si sa mori. Exista razboaiele. In jurul nostru e o saracie care ne face pe toti rai. In fiecare secunda se poate intampla ceva care sa te faca sa suferi in asa fel incat nu-ti ajung niciodata lacrimile.

I am listening, I thought, to the cacophony of my digestive tract. Of course, I’d long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn’t much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on Earth. And if often seems like I can feel them, living and breeding and dying in and on me.

But surely the most important of all the relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when all goes well, delight. Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy. One

The earliest modern attempt to test prayer’s efficacy was Sir Francis Galton’s innovative but flawed survey in 1872.16 The field languished until the 1960s, when several researchers began clinical and laboratory studies designed to answer two fundamental questions: (1) Do the prayerful, compassionate, healing intentions of humans affect biological functions in remote individuals who may be unaware of these efforts? (2) Can these effects be demonstrated in nonhuman processes, such as microbial growth, specific biochemical reactions, or the function of inanimate objects? The answer to both questions appears to be yes.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous. Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)... Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells. According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed.

[[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness – all extant bio-systems being equally evolved – so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment. Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence. All political institutions are cyberian military targets. Take universities, for instance. Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. To be continued.

This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26

PLOŞNIŢE: Dintre toate formele de sexualitate animală, cea a ploşniţelor de pat (Cimex lectularius) este cea mai stupefiantă. Nici o închipuire omenească nu poate egala o asemenea perversiune. Prima particularitate: priapismul. Ploşniţa de pat nu se opreşte niciodată din copulaţie. Unii indivizi au peste două sute de raporturi sexuale pe zi. A doua particularitate: homosexualitatea şi bestialitatea. Ploşniţele de pat întâmpină dificultăţi în deosebirea semenilor şi, dintre aceşti semeni, le este şi mai greu să recunoască femelele. 50% din raporturile lor sunt homosexuale, 20% se produc cu alte specii, iar 30% se efectuează cu femele. A treia particularitate: penisul perforant. Ploşniţele de pat sunt echipate cu un sex lung dotat cu un vârf ascuţit. Prin intermediul acestui instrument asemănător cu o seringă, masculii străpung carapacea şi îşi injectează sămânţa oriunde, la întâmplare ― în cap, în abdomen, în labe, în spinare, ba chiar şi în inima doamnei lor! Operaţia nu afectează cu nimic sănătatea femelei, dar cum ar mai putea ele să rămână însărcinate în asemenea condiţii? De unde şi... ... A patra particularitate: virgina însărcinată. Din exterior, vaginul ei pare intact şi, totuşi, ea a primit o lovitură de penis în spinare. Cum pot supravieţui spermatozoizii în sânge? De fapt, majoritatea vor fi distruşi de sistemul imunitar, ca nişte vulgari microbi străini. Pentru a multiplica şansele ca vreo sută dintre aceşti gameţi masculi să ajungă la destinaţie, cantitatea de spermă eliberată e fenomenală. Cu titlu de comparaţie, dacă masculii ploşniţe ar avea dimensiunile unei fiinţe omeneşti, ei ar elibera treizeci de litri de spermă la fiecare ejaculare. Din această mulţime de spermatozoizi va supravieţui un număr extrem de mic. Ascunşi în ungherele arterelor, pitiţi prin vene, ei îşi vor aştepta sorocul. Femela îşi petrece iarna găzduindu-i pe aceşti locatari clandestini. Primăvara, conduşi de instinct, toţi spermatozoizii din cap, labe şi abdomen se strâng în jurul ovarelor, le străpung şi pătrund în interiorul lor. Fazele următoare ale ciclului se vor desfăşura fără nici o problemă. A cincea particularitate: femela cu sexe multiple. Fiind tot timpul perforate pretutindeni de sexele masculilor, femelele ploşniţe ajung la un moment dat să fie acoperite de cicatrice care conturează fante maronii înconjurate de o zonă deschisă la culoare. Asemenea unor ţinte! În felul acesta se poate şti câte acuplări a avut femela. Natura a încurajat aceste nelegiuiri dând naştere unor adaptări ciudate. Generaţie după generaţie, anumite mutaţii au ajuns să creeze incredibilul însuşi. Ploşniţele de sex feminin au ajuns să se nască având pe spate pete maronii, aureolate de o culoare deschisă. Fiecărei pete îi corespunde un receptacul care este un "sex sucursală" legat direct de sexul principal. Particularitatea aceasta există actualmente în toate fazele dezvoltării sale: lipsa cicatricelor, câteva cicatrice receptacule la naştere, veritabile vagine secundare pe spinare. A şasea particularitate: autoîncornorarea. Ce se întâmplă atunci când un mascul este perforat de un alt mascul? Sperma supravieţuieşte şi înaintează ca de obicei spre regiunea ovarelor. Negăsindu-le, se îndreaptă spre canalele deferente ale gazdei şi se amestecă cu spermatozoizii autohtoni. Rezultatul: când masculul pasiv va perfora, la rândul sau, o femelă, el îi va injecta propriii spermatozoizi, dar şi pe cei ai masculului cu care a întreţinut raporturi sexuale. A şaptea particularitate: hermafroditismul. Natura nu conteneşte să facă experienţe ciudate pe cobaiul său sexual favorit şi masculii ploşniţe au suferit, la rândul lor, mutaţii: în Africa trăieşte ploşniţa Afrocimex constrictus, ai cărei masculi se nasc cu nişte mici vagine secundare pe spinare. Aceştia nu sunt, totuşi, fecunzi. Se pare că aceste vagine au un rol pur decorativ sau de încurajare a raporturilor homosexuale.

Bare ground sets in motion a different set of circumstances: moisture loss, less food for microbes, and therefore less microbial activity, which results in fewer nutrients for crops, leading to less-than-vigorous leaves, less photosynthetic activity, and less carbon flowing through the roots and being cached in the soil.

findings suggest that the use of glyphosate—currently applied to hundreds of millions of acres of the world’s crop-growing land—has multiple harmful effects related to plant nutrient uptake and soil microbial life.

exposure to antibiotics early in life causes microbial perturbations at a crucial time, just when organs and systems are developing.

Imagine being able to tweak your gut microbial profile to help you effortlessly lose weight, terminate type 2 diabetes, reduce your risk for depression, dementia, and cancer, and support skin health. Similarly, imagine shifting the skin’s microbial characteristics to thwart acne outbreaks, block UV rays and prevent skin cancer, deflect mosquitoes (indeed, new research shows that the microbes on our skin affect whether or not we are bitten), and usher in that coveted healthy glow. That’s the promise that this exciting field of medicine has to offer. Time to get ready for it.

The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to that similarity. Kinship at the sub-microbial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.

I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities, I'd be paranoid, too.

To understand what happens when we ingest lectin, let’s consider the example of wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), a lectin contained within wheat. Like other lectins, WGA is sticky, readily binding to other proteins it comes in contact with. After it enters our digestive tract, WGA sticks to the intestinal villi (fingerlike projections along the walls of the gut that are critical for the absorption of nutrients). The binding of WGA to the villi results in the damage and death of its cells. This destruction of the villi caused by lectins, including WGA, interferes with our ability to absorb nutrients from food. There is also evidence that lectins disrupt the gut’s natural flora. These microorganisms in our gut not only play an important role in digestion, but their disruption can result in the growth and proliferation of unhealthy microorganisms, such as E. coli, which can overrun the normal gut microbial environment and make us ill.

Cresting the peaks, the transpod descended on the other side — down, down until they ghosted over the corpse of the heartlands, which lacked even the fetid microbial life to animate the cadaver. Absent rot, the land lay lifeless, like some mummified king fallen from grace, hollowed and shrouded in a mantle of radioactive dust.

No one knows the number of bacterial species. About 5,000 species have been characterized and another 10,000 have been partially identified. Biodiversity authority Edward O. Wilson has estimated that biology has identified no more than 10 percent of all species and possibly as little as 1 percent. Wilson’s reasoning would put the total number of bacterial species at 100,000, probably a tenfold underestimate. Most environmental microbiologists believe that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all bacteria can currently be grown in laboratories so that they can be identified. Microbial geneticist J.

we proposed eighteen great ideas of science that we felt framed virtually all discoveries of the natural world and all advances in technology. We could not have foreseen many of the remarkable developments of the past two decades—nanotechnology archaea, LEDs, cloning, dark energy, ancient microbial fossils and deep microbial life, evidence for oceans of water on Mars and lakes of methane on Titan, ribozymes, carbon nanotubes, extrasolar planets, and so much more. But all of these unanticipated findings fit into the existing framework of science. The core concepts of science have not changed, and we are unable to point to any fundamentally new scientific principle that has emerged during the 1990s or 2000s. Accordingly, while every chapter has been significantly updated, we have added only a single new chapter on the explosion of advances in biotechnology. We conclude that the experience of the past two decades underscores the value of the great ideas approach to achieving scientific literacy.

Intelligent Design is fraught with even more difficulties, as it suggests God as one who dips His hand in every now and then to bring about the first microbial life, to bring about new forms during the Cambrian explosion, and to finally create humans after 4.55 billion years of earth, while He was doing... what exactly? According to Intelligent Design advocates, God tinkers with animal life every once in a few hundred million years or so, for reasons never made explicitly clear.

All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.

Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutchman, was amongst the first to demonstrate their planetary importance. Reclusive, brusque, and unpopular, he had no love for people, except for a few close colleagues, nor any love for medical microbiology. Disease didn't interest him. He wanted to study microbes in their natural habitats: soil, water, plant roots. In 1888, he found bacteria that pulled nitrogen out of the air and turned it into ammonia for plants to use; later, he isolated species that contributed to the movements of sulphur through the soil and atmosphere. This work stimulated a rebirth of microbiology in Beijerinck's city of Delft-where Leeuwenhoek had first laid eyes on bacteria two centuries earlier. The members of this new found Delft school, along with intellectual soulmates like the Russian Sergei Winogradsky, called themselves microbial ecologists. They revealed that microbes were not just threats to humanity but critical components of the world.

The Proterozoic Earth somehow “understood” the fundamental principles of sustainability; geochemical trading flourished, but all commodities flowed in closed loops— the waste products of one group of microbial manufacturers were the raw materials of another.

The latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones – a roughly even split. Even these numbers are inexact, but that does not really matter: by any reckoning, we contain multitudes.

These are Meyer lemons,” Horace said as we passed the trees. “Named for Frank Nicholas Meyer. Dutch by birth, but an agent of the United States government. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction before the First World War. I thought of him when Jaina Mitra spoke of her microbial survey. Meyer and his cohort were hunters for larger prey. They canvassed the world and sent back living samples of plants thought to be useful to the advancement of the American economy. Meyer worked in China. He sent the first soybean to America. And persimmons! Any persimmon grown in this country today comes from that lineage. And of course, there are these lemons—named for him. Meyer died in China. He drowned in the Yangtze, pushed from a riverboat.

Strive for excellence, follow your conscience and heart, and welcome feedback with open arms. Relentlessly pursue your craft.

See, In India I am going to say as I am Indian citizen, yes there is environmental concerns everywhere in India but they seem to be tiny and can be tackled within 20 years. So either it is exaggerated problem or the real pollution data is not open source i .e - Government is indirectly supporting and/ or hiding monopolies. Because governments focus is only on farming practices where land lords are having too much lands and using mixed system of farming because of unpredictable weather and indeed it does pollute the soil but applying biological remediation will obviously help treat and cleanse them. Why biological remediation is not at all considered? Animal genomics is under ethics, ok understood but microbial genomics, plant genomics? See there is certainly environmental problems from industries that affect farming, But i visualize that it is to eliminate land lords to make complete manu smiriti India. And who polluted farming system, obviously fertilizers and who allowed it? Indian government! before 200 years was there fertilizers in India? Why did they allow it, is it because they wanted pollute it for the money they get from foreign giants! or is it because they wanted to pollute the environment deliberately and then they want to cleanse it so that they get good names and meanwhile while cleansing strategies applied, as a partnership they enter into the system and then they eliminate land holders and make them sudras again manusmiriti concept! Isn't it? Do you know something this manu smiriti concept never much happened in South India, yeah it happened only upto certain level not completely like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. You people have polluted the environment now just pretending to be gods of saving nature and after inturns slowly making manusmiriti India. Yes south has pollution, and we know how to tackle it, we have scientists, we have context specific reasons, we have languages and cultures to protect. Indian law says, every cultures have their own rights to preserve their culture. Yes world is one, I agree, Context specificity always remains same. We have problems yes agreed we resolve it, Indian government as a sovereign country, it your duty to support our work and question only when it is against law, humanism and immorality.

On a cell-for-cell basis, we are 90 percent microbial. We don’t just live on the earth—the earth lives in us.

An emerging field of study has begun to evaluate the extent to which this gut flora impacts food choice, establishing a fascinating link between microorganisms and the foods we pine for. In other words, there’s evidence to support a microbial basis for craving. To illustrate, a team of Swiss researchers determined that people who crave chocolate actually harbor different types of microbial colonies in their gut than those who are indifferent to chocolate. And there’s evidence to suggest that this may indeed be the case for many other types of food as well.*6 But what does this mean? Certain microbiologists, including my friend Compton Rom, submit that there is in fact a very direct and causal connection between our intestinal microbial ecology and the way we think. That, in fact, these microbes message our brains, effectively telling us what to eat. Turns out, it’s our microbes that hold sway over our cravings.

If you saw the documentary Super Size Me, you recall filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s quest to see what would happen if he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for thirty consecutive days. For the first few days, we watched him cringe, even vomit from his relentless fare of Big Macs, fries, and shakes. He felt sick. He suffered terrible headaches. But then a funny thing happened. That feeling of sickness went away. The headaches disappeared. Suddenly, he began to crave the food that just days prior had him cringing and buckled over. Then he began to wake up each morning with a headache that wouldn’t quit until he got his McDonald’s fix. How can this be explained? According to Compton, Morgan’s dietary shift from a primarily plant-based diet to an entirely fast-food regimen effectively and quite rapidly replaced his healthy gut flora with a pathogenic microbial ecology that thrived specifically on the ingredients present in McDonald’s food.

I remember when I first learned that human beings had microbial clouds hovering in the air around them at all times. I'd been sitting at my desk on the fifth floor of a corporate building in lower Manhattan for five hours when the data scientist James Meadow told me I’d probably shed millions of microbes all over my cubicle that day. "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that," Meadow said into the phone. He worked at the time at a company in San Francisco focused on monitoring the health of the indoor microbiome in places like offices and hospitals, and he'd recently published a paper. "We give off a million biological particles from our body every hour as we move around," he continued. "I have a beard; when I scratch it, I'm releasing a little plume into the air. It's just this cloud of particles we're always giving off, that happens to be nearly invisible.

As adults, the responsibility of caring for all the cells in our bodies, both human and microbial, falls to us. As mothers, women pass on not only their own genes, but the genes of hundreds of bacteria. The genetic lottery of life has an element of chance, but also one of choice. The more insight we gather into the importance and the consequences of a natural birth, and extended, exclusive breast-feeding, the more empowered we will be to give both ourselves and our children the best chance of lives of health and happiness.

fully 99 percent of the genetic material in your body is not your own. It belongs to your microbial comrades. These microbes not only influence the expression of our DNA, but research reveals that throughout our evolution microbial DNA has become part of our own DNA. In other words, genes from microbes have inserted themselves into our genetic code (mitochondrial DNA being the prime example) to help us evolve and flourish.

Antibiotics aren’t the only cause of dysbiosis. Gastrointestinal infections themselves can deplete the microbiome, and the subsequent decrease in microbial richness can lead to increased susceptibility to disease. Many patients trace the beginnings of their decline in health to an infectious event—from Montezuma’s revenge in Mexico to dysentery on safari in southern Africa to a bout of giardia from contaminated water closer to home. Post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome is a well-described phenomenon, and up to 10 percent of patients with inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis point to a significant infectious event that marks the beginning of their illness, particularly if their microbiome was already compromised from prior antibiotic use.

She had heard the panspermia theory before but didn’t know its name. “The theory that a meteorite splashed into the primordial soup, bringing the first seeds of microbial life to earth.

Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever.

microbial resistance to antibiotics…

Because faeces are not drugs, and all you need is a kitchen blender, some saline and a sieve, with a little help from YouTube videos, anyone can administer their own faecal transplant, and many thousands do. Among those giving it a go, not surprisingly, are the parents of autistic children. Dr Borody himself has seen improvements in autistic children following both faecal transplants and after repeatedly delivering faecal microbes via a flavoured drink. His intention was to relieve the gastrointestinal symptoms, not the psychiatric ones, but Borody says several of the children improved following their treatment. The most encouraging was a young child with a vocabulary of just over twenty words, which shot up to around 800 in the weeks after the microbial therapy. For now, all this is anecdotal. As yet not a single clinical trial has been carried out to test the effects of faecal transplant on autistic patients, though some are planned. The lack of evidence won’t stop the parents though – for many, anything is worth a try.

The idea behind the Hormone Reset is simple: in three-day bursts, you’ll focus on making specific dietary changes, starting with eliminating meat and alcohol, which resets your estrogen, liver, and gut microbiome—the genetic material of the trillions of microbial critters that live in your body. Every three days you’ll eliminate specific metabolism-wrecking foods and trade up for better foods, which will reset your misfiring hormones, building on the collaboration and regulatory synergy between them so you can feel like yourself again, in body harmony.

Ecosystems are amazingly complex, from climate, geography, and geology down to the insect and microbial level. This makes particular places better or worse than others at growing particular things. There

life on Earth is basically a giant microbial vat and eukaryotic organisms are merely the bubbles on its surface? Are we – the froth – deluded in valuing ourselves so highly?

We are, at least from the standpoint of DNA, more microbial than human.

Although microbial testing kits are starting to emerge on the market,

Bare ground devoid of plant cover retains heat and has little moisture to spare. Radiation from the sun, then, just sits there and the soil proceeds to dry out, oxidize, compact, and lose the capacity to absorb water and sustain microbial life, all of which makes it more likely to remain plantless.

Steven Apfelbaum, a restoration ecologist in Wisconsin, says that every 1 percent increase in soil carbon holds an additional sixty thousand gallons of water per acre. Not only does this limit damage from erosion, but it also keeps water on the land. This feeds plants, builds aquifers, and maintains the moisture that promotes microbial life.

microbial diversity

Routine assessments of agricultural soils rarely extend beyond the top 10 to 15 centimeters and are generally limited to determining the status of a small number of elements, notably phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N). Overemphasis on these nutrients has masked the myriad of microbial interactions that would normally take place in soil; interactions that are necessary for carbon sequestration, precursor to the formation of fertile topsoil.

Broadacre farming, which removes existing ground cover so that crops are sown on cleared fields, damages soil structure, interrupts fungal and microbial associations, and releases stored carbon. Pasture cropping, by contrast, leaves soil dynamics intact. It also supports a variety of plants, in particular many deep-rooted grasses engaged in carbon–mineral–water exchanges underground.

The world around us is a gigantic reservoir of potential microbial partners. Every mouthful could bring in new microbes that digest a previously unbreakable part of our meals, or that detoxify the poisons in a previously inedible food, or that kill a parasite that previously suppressed our numbers. Each new partner might help its host to eat a little more, travel a little further, survive a little longer.

We have already seen how pliable the microbiome can be. It can change with a touch, with a meal, with a parasitic incursion or a dose of medicine, or simply with the passage of time. It is a dynamic entity that waxes and wanes, forms and re-forms. This flexibility underlies many of the interactions between microbes and their hosts. It means that symbioses can change in positive ways, as new microbial partners offer fresh genes, abilities, and evolutionary opportunities to their hosts. It means that partnerships can change in negative ways, as dysbiotic communities or missing microbes lead to disease. And it means that partnerships can change in deliberate ways-ways that we choose. Theodor Rosebury recognised this back in 1962. Our indigenous microbes are "no less subject than the rest of our environment to manipulation for human benefit", he wrote. We should accept them as a natural part of our lives but acceptance "need not be passive or resigned".

Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.

your microbial genes, which outnumber your human genes by an amazing 100 to 1. It’s a little humbling, but to an outside observer, you are a hybrid creature that is genetically only one percent human.

In one study that capitalized on a natural experiment, a genetically homogeneous human population straddles the national boundaries of Finland and Russia. The prevalence of type 1 diabetes is four times greater on the Finnish side than on the Russian side. This difference is accompanied by a striking difference in microbial diversity sampled from homes.

Studies are currently under way to determine if gut microbial changes are associated with positive mind-based interventions, such as hypnosis and meditation, and if these changes lead to symptom improvements in such disorders as irritable bowel syndrome.

Fasting brings back the health of these microbes. It does this in four ways: It improves microbial diversity, moves microbes away from the gut lining, improves the production of bacteria that change white fat into brown fat, and regenerates stem cells that will repair the gut lining. (Brown fat is the fat that keeps you warm. It is also an easier fat to burn for energy.) All four of these factors are key if you are looking to lose weight.

Recommended Protocol for Reducing Inflammation I recommend the following supplementation for my patients with elevated biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress: vitamin C (500 to 1,000 mg/day); vitamin E (200 to 400 IU/day of mixed tocopherols); vitamin K (K1 and K2 MK-4 and MK-7 450 mcg to 5 mg/day); alpha-lipoic acid (300 to 600mg/day—not recommended for people withgastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)); coenzyme Q10 (100 mg/day); milk thistle (400 mg/day); N-acetyl cysteine (500 to 1,000 mg, three times a day); taurine (1 to 3 g/day); fish oil (2 to 3 g/day); berberine (500 mg/day, or 1,000 mg/day short-term for those with intestinal dysbiosis, a condition of microbial imbalances); rho-iso-alpha acids (500 mg/day); probiotics (3 to 20 billion/day); and DHEA (25 mg/day), when indicated.

You know what oil is? The compressed corpses of once-living things- plants, animals, dinosaurs, microbial shit. You know what that means about every jet that flies across the ocean? Every car and train and truck, every plastic bottle and latex glove and pair of polyester pants? They're all full of ghosts.

Only one percent of your genes are human, and those genes are fairly stable, but your microbial genes—the other 99 percent—are in constant flux. Measured by your genes, you’re a different creature each and every morning.

By bringing back our microbial ‘old friends’ from natural environments, we can start to heal the disconnection between humans and the rest of nature.

This microbial cloud we emit is a biological internet—a phenomenal multi-species correspondence.

We can view ourselves as walking ecosystems—human hosts plus trillions of microbial symbionts.

This, Gianoli thinks, could be what is going on with boquila. Genetic material from microbes could be controlling the part of a plant’s genome responsible for leaf shape, and nearby boquila could simply be picking up on the same interference; being showered, as it were, with foreign microbial genetic material.

For example, two commonly used emulsifiers—carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80—reduce microbial diversity, induce inflammation, and promote obesity and colitis in mice. Titanium dioxide (TiO) nanoparticles, found in more than nine hundred food products, worsen intestinal inflammation. Additives such as these were snuck into our diet through the “Generally Recognized As Safe” loophole. They were GRASed into our diet. Yes, GRAS needs to be used as a verb because that’s the only way to adequately describe the careless acceptance of chemicals into our food supply by our regulatory agencies.

In Bonn, Baluška and his colleagues are starting to grow boquila plants in a greenhouse to test their vision hypothesis. If Baluška’s team succeeds in getting boquila to mimic a plastic plant in a controlled environment, their vision hypothesis would surely become more plausible. And there’s certainly no possibility of jumping microbial information emanating from a plastic plant.

modern civilization’s highly processed foods, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and enhanced hygiene, we may be tipping the balance away from this long-term association—and actually placing that relationship in danger. It is possible that this microbial shift underpins the swift and otherwise inexplicable increases in obesity, autoimmune diseases, depression, anxiety, and many other health problems that we see today.

Many of the scientists who contributed to the emerging discipline of microbiology were from France, the country so renowned for its extraordinary diversity of cheese, wine, and bread—all products of microbial fermentation.

In the 1990s, researchers discovered units of genetic material called "small RNA," or sometimes "micro RNA." They originate in microbes like bacteria and viruses, and as of now 2,600 distinct types of micro RNA have been discovered in the human body. It is believed that these bits of foreign genetic material collectively regulate as much as one-third of the genes in our genome. Even more recently, researchers have discovered that micro RNA play a role in plants' lives, too. They are often exchanged between parasitic plants and their hosts, and can act as signaling molecules between plants. The small RNA from one plant is also now known to be able to interfere with the gene expression in other, nearby plants. This, Gianoli thinks, could be what is going on with boquila. Genetic material from microbes could be controlling the part of a plant's genome responsible for leaf shape, and nearby boquila could simply be picking up on the same interference; being showered, as it were, with foreign microbial genetic material.