All this talk about present day antibiotics going obsolete and superbugs/viruses/pathogens, why don't we use beneficial bacteria/fungi/archea and microorganisms to compete with the bad ones for nutrients? Wouldn't this be a way to fight disease and illness?

I know beneficial ones are out there. Actinomycetes to name one off the top of my head.

That already happens, it's called normal flora and we're all bathed in it, inside and out

It's not much different from the grass in your yard (normal flora) vs the weeds (disease causing bacteria)....

Even in the best, most plush lawn you can still get weeds..

On the one hand, we already do that. Most antibacterials were developed from chemicals produced by other organisms. So we take the useful chemical and use it.

As far as living organisms, the field of probiotics is in its infancy. Most of the results so far are in gut or mouth problems, but it seems like we're just scratching the surface here. People think our native flora might influence things as weight, heart attack, and risk for developing disease.

I'm also pretty intrigued by ****e therapy, where we use special viruses to target bad bacteria. They've studied it in Russia and Eastern Europe. It might come to nothing, but the idea sounds neat. After all, a bacteri****e should be harmless to humans and devastate bacteria, which is exactly what you want in a good antibacterial.

does dds in your name mean you went to dental school?

This is literally the idea behind eating yogurt and every other probiotic. Along with fecal transplants, and other treatments based on management of the countless lives inside you.

Dogs don't eat crap for the taste

I'm an idiot who does not play a doctor on tv and hasn't even seen every episode of Scrubs (which my brother says is actually closer to reality than Grey's and several other shows) but

Isn't that also partially why local honey is eaten because supposedly it helps with allergies? Are those related to what you mean?

And yogurts because the probiotics?

However, if I could get me some pilot fish or cleaner fish or whatever and not have to go to the dentist, that would be what's up.

The local honey thing has to do with desensitization within whats more commonly considered the immune system, white blood cells, antibodies...etc


What's suggested here is also a function of the collective immune system but more like your skin, it's mechanical. Weeds dont grow as well when they gotta compete with a plush lawn of St Augustine

There's some biochemistry in there as well as mentioned earlier, and some symbiotic relationships with microbes but all of that is normal, how things are.

This seems like the start of a syfy movie.


or most superhero movies.

bacterio****e therapy is a promising field. Lytic ****e are highly lethal. It's estimated that half of all the bacteria in the ocean are killed every day by ****e.

It has its drawbacks for use in humans though. The primary drawback is that lytic ****e are generally very host specific. So to work as a therapy, information about the exact pathogen target strain is required, which takes time not often available for acute disease treatment. Additionally, bacteria develop resistance to ****e just as they do to antibiotics. There are other considerations as well.. Humans generally have a strong immune response to ****e, often producing neutralizing antibodies after short-term exposure.

Ultimately it does work very well, the first time.. But for chronic conditions it hasn't proven very useful.

As others have mentioned, the scenario you describe is the natural state of your gut. The general theory is that your gut microbiota inhibit pathogen adherence and colonization by being both a physical barrier (just taking up the available space) as well as competing for nutrients.

One of the current problems in understanding the human microbial communities well enough to purposefully manipulate them is their enormous complexity. There are trillions of bacteria from hundreds of species that inhabit the human gut. Many of them aren't found anywhere else. We've only recently had the technology necessary to probe these communities genetically. More than 90% of these bacteria/fungi/viruses found in the healthy human can't currently be grown in isolation in the lab.

Part of what has held this area of study back is the preoccupation (for obvious reasons) with the study of pathogens. We have all kinds of genetic tools and sequenced genomes of the relatively few human pathogens, but we know very little about the hundreds of species that inhabit us all the time.

We do know that microbiome manipulations can have very strong, immediate phenotypic effects. There have been multiple studies showing that fecal transplants from thin healthy people into obese diabetic people temporarily restores insulin sensitivity as well as alleviating other symptoms of metabolic syndrome, albeit temporarily. And the reverse has also been shown in animals. Namely, the transplantation of fecal material from obese mice into normal mice causes the normal mice to gain weight at an abnormal rate and to exhibit characteristics normally associated with obesity (high blood pressure, insulin insensitivity, etc..) But again, this effect is transient.

Additionally, performing fecal transplantations from a healthy donor into people with recalcitrant C. diff infections works so well, the FDA has allowed their administration without having to go through their investigational new drug process.

There is also an entire class of food considered to be prebiotics. These are substances not digestible by humans that promote the growth and maintenance of "healthy" microbial communities within the human gut.

These are all good replies. Good discussion. All comments are spot on.

I would like to see the day I have a plant growing out of my skin that helps me be smarter or benefits one of my 5 senses or increases brain functionality. Partner with mother nature to reach new dimensions of life and living. This would be awesome!

I'm really enjoying madlibbing this post with cuss words...cuz I'm basically an eighth grader at heart.

Whether it does any good or not is a great question, but I take my probiotic capsule every day thirty minutes before supper.

Actinomycetes has a cousin named Streptomycetes that is just, if not more, beneficial.

It was a fungus growing on the fruit of a plant that led humans to discover penicillin.

What discoveries involving microorganisms have humans not made yet to get rid of HIV/AIDS or any other disease for that matter?

Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg! As far as the soil food web is concerned, pathogens/bacteria/fungi are way down the food chain. Plant's are at the top!

Once humans saw how fungus and microorganisms could lead to advancements in fighting disease, why haven't we embraced beneficial microorganisms? Why have we not completely eradicated HIV/AIDS and other diseases/pathogens?

It's easy to "kill" things in a test tube. Delivering these killing chemicals to a specific body tissue at a specific concentration for a specific amount of time is a little different. Not to mention it has to some how be discriminatory between pathogen and host.

Bleach kills all of these diseases.. Why can't we just drink bleach when we're sick? Same concept.

HIV can integrate into the human genome. Effectively becoming part of you. How do you target that?

Our gut ecosystem is actually really important for things such as our mental health. Studies are being done over the transplanting of bacteria from non-depressed individuals to depressed individuals and a decrease in symptoms has been shown.

I feel like the OP needs to spend some time on /r/askscience.

Indeed. The human microbiome is what I study.

The microbiome has a huge impact on human health, but the more we study it, the more complex and complicated the host/microbe interactions reveal themselves to be. The composition of the microbial communities within your body affect many things: the efficiency of calorie harvest from the diet, inflammatory markers, your appetite, amounts and diversity of bile salts produced in the liver, and fat synthesis in the liver. It also affects uptake, toxicity, and efficacy of drugs that we take, as some bacteria are capable of altering the drug's chemical structure once we ingest it. The microbes in us also produce vitamin k and other compounds we need in addition to breaking down indigestible food substances into absorbable nutrients.

There are dozens of studies where the observed effect is thought to be mediated by the microbial populations residing within us. For example:

- Depression and anxiety as you mentioned, we call it the gut-brain axis.

- Maternal diet while pregnant has a significant effect on offspring social development (specifically a high-fat diet while pregnant leads to impaired neurological development and social deficits). But this effect can be reversed by supplementation with certain bacteria. Also worth noting, germ-free mice are socially deficient.

- Consuming polyphenols (green tea) changes the gut microbial composition, and is associated with many anti-diabetic effects.

- It's also hypothesized that specific viral infections during childhood result in the development of the autoantibodies responsible for Type 1 diabetes.

- Transferring fecal bacteria from an obese human into a mouse results in the mouse gaining a significant amount of weight. Transferring fecal material from the obese person's normal-weight twin does not.


There are many other studies like these. But what's currently missing in all of this is mechanism. We can show these effects in well thought out studies, but we haven't yet gotten to the answer of "How" in most cases.

I've enjoyed when I've read a little on this in the past. it's also kind of startling to learn that we (our bodies) aren't just "us" but a bit of a "we" when we take these tenants into account.