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: 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. But the evidence wasn’t exactly a smoking gun, since the archaea were present in only about one-third of diseased gums, and shared the space with many other kinds of microbes. They published their results in April 2004 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A similar study by scientists in Brazil and Germany found archaea in five out of 20 gum disease samples. They also linked archaea with infectious disease without implicating them explicitly as the cause, according to a paper published in April 2006 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. And sights were not just on gum disease.