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: 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. That same year, Japanese researchers examined plaque from 13 coronary arteries and found evidence of archaea in all of them. They published their results in the journal Clinics, concluding that they may be the first to discover disease-causing archaea inside human organs. Lepp warned, however, that their methods may have been flawed in part because they lacked proper experimental controls. Stanford’s David Relman, who headed the American gum disease study, has forged a reputation as an archaea disease hunter. But unlike Torsten Thomas at New South Wales, he does not suspect they could be a direct cause.