How about "flooding" your colon virus particles that carry your specific insert? It could easily be manufactured, and if you select for integration with a self selection mechanism like the toxin-antitoxins Cathal was going to use in his indiegogo project, which could be fairly easy to select out the bacteria that don't have your required insert.
-- That does have some problems of its own, thou. Maybe a better idea would be a conjugation plasmid inside packaged inside of a virus. Engineer it for minimal metabolic tole, and have it encode several viral repressor molecules (such as lambda's cro and cll). Then after you insert the plasmid, select by using a lytic phage for your insert.
-Koeng
On Friday, August 22, 2014 2:24:33 AM UTC-7, Cathal Garvey wrote:
On Friday, August 22, 2014 2:24:33 AM UTC-7, Cathal Garvey wrote:
Actually, the wrong microbiome could certainly predispose you to long
term consequences; obesity, dementia, cancers.. the microbiome is still
being explored and it's associated with virtually everything if you look
for subtle enough effects.
A lot of that hasn't been teased out of the realm of correlation and
into causation, so for example obese persons may have a certain
microbiome because it thrives on low fibre, high sugar/saturate diets.
Even studies that observe 'biomes prior to obesity and observe outcomes
may be simply seeing the effects of diet on the microbiome prior to the
effects of diet upon metabolism.
Also, the odds of successfully inoculating yourself with a new species
are, it would seem, pretty low. Some rare species can colonise a gut
without much difficulty, but in most cases it seems that if you already
have a microbiome, throwing more bugs at it won't lead to much change. I
imagine diet is the primary cause here; bifidobacteria may be associated
with good health, but you probably can't force them to grow simply by
bif-spamming your colon if your diet doesn't support their continued
competitive survival in the gut.
So, I'd say there are a lot of unknowns and a low chance of success with
microbiome engineering at present, and we understand so little of the
"levers" by which the microbiome acts on metabolism that it's doubtful
you could come up with a comprehensive way to engineer it, anyway.
That's my view, at least!
-Cathal
On 22/08/14 08:11, Patrik D'haeseleer wrote:
> How about human microbiome? If you consider the gut microbiome as an organ
> in itself, inserting engineered bacteria would probably be the safest
> "human" hello world. At least you wouldn't be risking turning one of your
> own cells cancerous.
>
> Patrik
>
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