Title: Archaea: Hot springs, the Dead Sea, and your intestines | The Undoctored Blog
Headings: Archaea: Hot springs, the Dead Sea, and your intestines
Archaea: Hot springs, the Dead Sea, and your intestines
Content: You can also find them in the guts of ruminants and insects where they assist with digestion. You can even find them at the bottom of the ocean and in Antarctic ice. In other words, they are extremely adaptable, able to survive in conditions that few other organisms can. Some scientists believe that, if we are to discover life on places like the moon or Mars, they are likely to be something like Archaea. I don’t believe that we can classify the human gastrointestinal tract as an extreme environment, though certainly one I would not want to live in. Most humans harbor Archaea in their digestive tracts where they may provide some benefits, such as consuming hydrogen gas produced by bacteria, consuming toxic metabolites resulting from bacterial protein fermentation, and reducing trimethylamine intestinal content. And, despite the many human diseases caused by bacteria—tuberculosis, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, etc.—Archaea are largely benign and appear to not typically cause human diseases. In other words, they seem less opportunistic than bacteria or viruses, benign co-inhabitants in creatures like mammals. This is why it is surprising that evidence is mounting associating the proliferation of Archaea such as Methanobrevibacter smithii, so-called because it produces methane gas rather than hydrogen gas, with a form of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, called methanogenic SIBO. Because methane gas has been shown to slow intestinal propulsive activity in the intestinal tract, the red flag for methanogenic SIBO is constipation.