Month: September 2022

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the theme of the pathobiome, and the change in thinking about diseases caused by microorganisms. It represents the confluence of modern biology with medicine, and how our concepts of organismal ecology have broader implications. Nature, it appears, is much more about interrelated connectedness than we ever thought before, including how we think about disease. View in LinkedIn

A DYNAMIC WEB. “Microorganisms cooperate, compete with, or even prey upon each other to better exploit resources. As with macroorganisms, competition for nutrients and space plays an important role in shaping microbial interactions.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

“ANTAGONISTIC EFFECTS have also been evidenced in the mosquito midgut between the bacteria Enterobacter sp. and the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, leading to reduced malaria transmission by mosquitoes.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL EVOLUTION. “Individual microorganisms evolve in the context of a community. In many ways, the evolution of a microorganism is influenced by selection pressures exerted by other microorganisms in the community. Mutation and gene flow are responsible for the creation of new genetic variants within populations.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

POPULATION HYBRIDS. “In addition, natural selection and genetic drift act by maintaining, increasing, or decreasing the frequency of these new genetic variants within populations.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL DIVERSIFICATION. “These processes shape the genetic composition of bacterial communities as well as their functional properties. The transfer of genetic information between species is a central and original mechanism of generating genetic diversity in microbial communities.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

SWAPPING GENES. “Bacterial species can exchange large regions of DNA potentially linked to pathogenicity as exemplified with Edwardsiella tarda, an enterobacterium causing fatal disease in fish.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

“THE ARCHITECTURE of communities, which dictates the phylogenetic proximity of microbes, affects the probability of gene exchanges. A trait can thus sweep through a microbial community under appropriate selection pressure, resulting in strong functional implications, such as pathogenicity or the capacity to infect different host species as has been recently shown for Bartonella spp.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

MULTILAYERED CAKE. “A major challenge in pathobiome research will thus be to develop and apply concepts and approaches of microbial ecology and evolutionary biology to pathogens and the microbial communities in which they exist. A peculiarity of pathobiomes is that they involve multiple complex interactions within microbial communities, the host and the environment, and are subject to strong selection pressures that sometimes lead to extreme adaptations (e.g., species which have recently become intracellular parasites).” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn

HEISENBERG LIVES ON. “The emergence of socially/economically relevant diseases is likely to be frequently linked with ecological disturbances caused by human intrusions into natural ecosystems.” https://lnkd.in/gEfVGaC View in LinkedIn