科学美国人60秒 SSS 2014-10-22

时间：2014-11-19 07:46:55

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These days, antibiotics¹ are no silver bullet. In fact, if you get them in the hospital, you may end up with an additional infection. Like the bug² Clostridium difficile, or C. diff—which infects more than 300,000 Americans a year and kills some 14,000. C. diff flourishes in the post-antibiotic, microbe-free landscape of your gut³. But there is a way to stop it—a fecal transplant. That cocktail⁴ of microbes from a healthy person's gut can rein⁵ in a C. diff outbreak. The question is not: Eewww? It’s: What are the transplant's active ingredients?

Well, one of them appears to be a bacterium⁶ called Clostridium scindens. Because in past studies, people and mice that harbored C. scindens were protected against a full-blown C. diff infection. So researchers dosed mice with the good guy, C. scindens, after a bout⁷ of antibiotics. And the treatment did indeed ward⁸ off C. diff, compared to a cocktail of other microbes, or nothing at all.

C. scindens makes a living by breaking down bile, the researchers say, and it's those secondary products that seem to inhibit⁹ C. diff. The findings are in the journal Nature.

This work could lead to more targeted probiotic treatments. But study author Eric Pamer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says it's worth remembering that when it comes to microbes, the sum is often greater than its parts. "In some ways I would say this is far more complex than an orchestra, in that there are many more interdependencies, and many of which we just don't understand yet, but that are starting to be illuminated¹⁰ by ongoing¹¹ work." Now, at least, we know one of the featured performers.

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科学美国人60秒 SSS 2014-10-22

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