Title: Making the Case Against Archaea | Scienceline
Headings: Making the Case Against Archaea
Making the Case Against Archaea
Disease hunters target an ancient form of life.
Robert Goodier • January 2, 2009
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Content: Archaea, he argues, may be responsible for some diseases with no known causes, such as Crohn’s disease, arthritis, lupus and gingivitis, to name some of the better known on his list. Many of his peers disagree, but if Thomas is right, then science is at a loss now to defend us against those diseases. There are no anti-archaeal drugs in development, and these microbes are daunting potential foes because they are poorly understood, hard to study and easily foil common techniques developed to ferret out conventional microbial culprits of disease. So far, the case against archaea is circumstantial, but they have no obvious alibi: archaea live inside us and other animals in guts and orifices – the same places where many diseases take their toll. Some scientists have begun peering into those places, this time with an eye out for archaea. In one study, microbiologists at Stanford University teamed up with peridontologists – experts on gum disease – at the University of California, San Francisco to plot the kinds of archaea found in the mouth. “What became apparent fairly quickly was that somebody either had archaea or they didn’t,” said Paul Lepp, now at Minot State University in North Dakota. “ And if they had it, you found it in peridontitis sites.” The more archaea the researchers found, the worse the gum disease.