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: Or maybe they have been causing disease all along right under our noses. “There is no inherent reason why archaea should not be involved in diseases. There is no fundamental biological or ecological barrier,” said Torsten Thomas, a microbiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “ It has been talked about in the scientific community for many years but nobody has really studied the reasons for the existence or nonexistence of pathogenic archaea.” Thomas thinks that should change. 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.