Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Hurray for Coffee and 2 X Chromosomes

Today's news has the results of this story showing that coffee drinkers have slightly lower death rates than non-coffee drinkers. Moreover, women drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day had a 25% lower rate of heart disease. And it didn't matter if the coffee was caffeinated or not.

The study was done with a survey of over 120,000 middle aged men and women. The editors of the journal caution that this does not mean that coffee decreases the chance of dying sooner rather than later. Something else about coffee drinkers might be protecting them. And there may be errors in measurement.

But this reminds me of another study I heard of a few months ago. In that one, they said that coffee has more antioxidant compounds than anything else in our normal diet. Could the antioxidants play a role? Hmmm.

Regardless, I don't have to feel guilt about enjoying that second cup of coffee.

Monkeys Learn to Fish

I read this news in my local paper last week. Long tailed macaques have a reputation for being highly skilled at finding food. Their food sources are usually fruit, insects, and foraging for crabs near water. No one had ever seen them fish before.

However, in Indonesia, silver haired monkeys were observed doing just that. Not just an isolated incident, but several times over the last 10 years, biologists observed the behavior in these long tailed macaques.

It's exciting to see new behavior in a species long observed. One of the authors of the study, Erik Meijaard with the Nature Conservancy, said "It's exciting that after such a long time, you see new behavior. "It's an indication of how little we know about the species. They are a survivor species, which has the knowledge to cope with difficult conditions. This behavior potentially symbolizes that ecological flexibility."

It shows an ability to adapt to the changing environment and shifting food sources.

They probably fish better than I ever did.

Here's the article.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

My Meeting Experience

I was in Boston last week at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. This is a huge meeting that I've been to several times in the past. I liken it to a buffet of microbiology. All things microbial are there. Thousands of scientists, students, and interested bystanders converge and converse on the great things that are small.

The meeting can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many people and topics. Often there are 2 or more talks going on at the same time that are of interest. But what I like about it is it gives the chance to survey what's new and hot in the field. Also it's a chance to revisit old friends--both microbial and human.

It's not so strange. Trust me. When you've done research on a particular organism, your interest in it doesn't wane simply because you've switched jobs. You always keep an eye on the latest news in what you've worked on before. After all, I dedicated a lot of effort into learning about and understanding a particular organism--it's quirks and traits, and just because I don't work on it anymore doesn't mean that I still don't find it interesting and cool.

But at the ASM meeting there's always something going on. If you find yourself bored by a particular talk, just look in the program: Oh there's a session on photosynthetic bacteria, and I haven't heard anything about photosynthetics in a few years--let's see what's new. The added and unmeasurable benefit of seeing talks outside of your immediate field is that it gives you a fresh perspective on what you DO do on a daily basis. You hear someone talk about studies they do in a completely different bacterium, and you think that maybe such a thing could work for you--either in an ongoing project or a new one for the future--in your system.

The ASM General meeting doesn't have a specific theme; however, themes tend to arise. This year was the year of metagenomics and the question of what is natural human microbiota. In English you ask? Read on:

We can only culture in the laboratory about 10% of the bacteria that are out there. Their diversity is vast, and nutritional and growth requirements unknown or difficult to reproduce in the lab, and we simply can't grow them. Either the temperature, pressure, nutrients are wrong, or they can't grow by themselves. Some only grow in the presence of other bacteria. Nonetheless, they are out there and affecting the environment and ecosystem. Recently, however, scientists have begun extracting DNA from these environments, and simply looking for bacterial signatures in that DNA. With those sequences they can predict bacteria that are in that environment. Some known--many unknown. A very famous study is Craig Venter's Sargasso Sea Project. Venter was a major player in sequencing the human genome. He took his boat to the Sargasso Sea and sampled the water and looked at the microbes that were there and documented the vast unculturable diversity.

This practice of sampling the DNA from an environment to assess the life that is there is Metagenomics.

Lots of metagenomics talks at ASM. And using metagenomics, various scientists are tackling the question of what is normal human microbiota. I wrote about this earlier when I mentioned skin microbes recently. I saw some of that work at this meeting, but scientists are also determining what is normal gut-associated bacteria, oral bacteria.

We're not sterile folks, and these resident microbes do a lot of good for us. And we can't culture them all. But metagenomics is starting to give us an idea of what lives in and on us. Once again, if we can determine what is normal and then see what is abnormal in various diseases, maybe the microbes can be manipulated???

Such probiotic treatment is fodder for the future, but it's nice that technology has provided us with a way to do basic microbiology in a very non-basic way to study the ecology of the microbial world.