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: The old technique, he said, was to swab an abscess, for example, and breed the extracted microbes on agar – a seaweed gelatin that nourishes them. Outside of the body in oxygen-rich open air, only those bacteria that survive in oxygen multiplied. The methanogens and other anaerobes vulnerable to oxygen, if there were any, were smothered. “So,” Wolfe conceded, “unless a laboratory takes a lot of caution to separate anaerobes from the sample then they could be missing something.” Thomas insists that archaea need to be studied further before they can be eliminated as suspects in causing unsolved diseases. Even if they are ultimately proven harmless, he says, that finding could be important if it turns out that archaea have a gene that suppresses toxicity – a gene that might be useful someday in stifling the power bacteria have to inflict damage. “I think that if we don’t find any pathogenic archaea it would be very interesting to find out why they aren’t,” Thomas says. “ Obviously that’s the best target to attack in bacteria. If we find something that bacteria do have and archaea don’t have, we need to attack that.” Gut microbes may help prevent type 1 diabetes.