21–30 of 157 posts
I for one welcome our new multicellular, cross-kingdom assemblages overlords.
Burn, baby, burn!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4580409/
https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/1...
My childhood explained. Trying to do exactly this for my kids: "Because these assemblages are found in saliva, targeting them early on could be a therapeutic strategy to prevent childhood tooth decay, says Koo. “If you block this binding or disrupt the assemblage before it arrives on the tooth and causes damage, that could be a preventive strategy.”"
How? Do you just mean by good oral care practices from an early age? Or something more off the beaten path?
I'm just doing the good oral care practices and it's working. My kid is going through dentists visits with flying colors. Not to jinx it.
Years ago, I recall reading about a putative Cavity Vaccine which was a bateriophage which targeted the tiny fraction of species present in the mouth responsible for tooth decay. Supposedly, a one time inoculation would confer lifelong protection. It has been decades and I have not heard anything more about this. Big Dentist keeping the research down or was there some "in mice" kind of gotcha which limited the treatm…
I remember reading in Popular Science on and off for years (00s) about all kinds of innovations that were right around the corner ('10-15 or so), much of which still remains firmly in "maybe one day" stage. Maybe a bunch of things didn't come to pass that I don't remember, but I clearly remember a lot of articles about air travel (delta wings everywhere!) and commercial space travel (Burt Rutan!). For a sense of how low my expectations got, I remember reading about the Boeing 7E7 and being surprised when a new generation of airliners was in fact coming out.
That experience has been born out many times since, in my adult life. I've all but completely stopped following "science journalism" as a result. I'll hear about it when it actually happens.
Biofilms has been a noted phenomenon with microbiologists for at least a couple of decades, though I have to admit I haven't seen motility discussed as one of the functions before...
Pattern formation by motile E. coli.
http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/labs/bacteria/movies/showmovi...
edit: here's a reference https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7596432/
Berg died about 10 months ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? Do you just mean by good oral care practices from an early age? Or something more off the beaten path?
Sorry, my bad. When I wrote it, I realized it might imply I'm doing something special. I'm just doing the good oral care practices and it's working. My kid is going through dentists visits with flying colors. Not to jinx it.
Sounds like advanced symbiosis. I wonder if the movement is across a gradient or whether the super organism has a control unit that makes decisions. Are we a result of similar microorganisms?
> Are we a result of similar microorganisms? I think the answer to your question is probably "yes." I listened to an interesting show on PBS radio 30 Oct. about what happened 2Byo that jump-started evolution. I can't find the show online, which explained in depth, but this short and patronizing video[1] covers the gist of it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhF5G2k45vY
Sounds like advanced symbiosis. I wonder if the movement is across a gradient or whether the super organism has a control unit that makes decisions. Are we a result of similar microorganisms?
Many of the stages required to imagine how life went from solo and unicellular, to cooperative unicellular, to specialized unicellular verging on multicellular, to full-specialization unable to survive independently as a single cell, exists in some species or other today.
E.g. Dictyostelium is an amoeba. (Amoebas are not bacteria; they're eukaryotes like animals or fungi -- sexual reproduction and an encased nucleus.) Individual cells can survive independently, hunting for much smaller bacteria and nutrients. But in the presence of many other cells of its species, chemical communication occurs to trigger and guide cell differentiation. Some at the exterior of the cluster change into a protective shell, like skin, or a macro cell-wall. Others specialize into ion transfer between the interior and exterior environment. Some are even triggered to kill themselves during the reproductive phase, providing nutrients to their kin.
It's on the line between multicellular, and not. Parts can float off and re-join. I think something like that was the intermediate stage in the evolution of multicellular life like animals, but there's many other competing hypotheses and none seem to be universally accepted.
This finding underscores the importance of taking preventative approaches to prevent attachment of biofilm producers (and why daily hygiene is so important), and finding more approaches to biofilm destabilization, like incorporating arginine into diets and possibly oral care products [2].
Source: founder of an oral microbiome testing company [3].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5122233
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The evolutionary adaptations oral bacteria have developed to coexist are fascinating. Another example is the known gum disease-causing species, P. gingivalis, can suppress our adaptive immunity [1]. This finding underscores the importance of taking preventative approaches to prevent attachment of biofilm producers (and why daily hygiene is so important), and finding more approaches to biofilm destabilization, like in…