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Are there efforts to genetically engineer superior gut biomes? Like a set of microbes that digest better, more efficient, filter out more toxins, produce vitamins, ignore too much carbs or fat, destroy harmful foreign bacteria or microbes etc?
It seems a relatively easy way to genetically improve homo sapiens. Can we do stuff like that already with the advances in AI for e.g. protein folding?
I went for a colonoscopy a couple of months ago. Ever since completing the prep, I've experienced a significant reduction in hunger. My appetite has always been horrid. I had to be starving constantly to lose any weight. Now, it's not like i'm never hungry, but I can eat a portion of food and feel satiated. The scale shows me slowly dropping down toward a safe weight.
Interesting anecdote. Maybe that is the point of all those cleanses or fasting stuff, to sort of "reset" an out of balance gut biome.
There are a few studies on short term effects post-cleansing but no general consensus, some people seem to get some advantages, some don't.
Yeah I imagine it could depend on lots of things, like the composition of biome that is already there, environment, lifestyle or diet.
They also mentioned differences in between cleansing agents, staggering of doses, filtering of air in the room for the inflation and limits to the size of the study
There was a hell of a lot to account for. And then, it's not like the gut bacteria are eradicated, they just come back in time, but due to the differences, the speed of recolonization and proportions of variety are sometimes drastically different.
that would be in the field of synthetic biology. although genetically engineering ecoli up produce more serotonin might be harder than using artificial selection to make happy ecoli.
about being better at digesting or making proteins, same thing, except that they already have natural selection pushing then to suggest as efficiently as possible.
in fact if you made a super strain, it'll eventually die out as it's replaced with the natural ecoli (or lose those traits) because they are less optimised than your original ecoli
The gut biome isn't well understood - there are tons (well, pounds) of bacteria we don't understand well, how they interplay, how they eat and digest and how the body is affected. We're just now at the point of having biome capsules that can be swallowed instead of fecal transplants, which is an improvement, but we don't really know what we're doing. They might take a family member and use their bacteria to treat someone's GERD for instance - but only in studies and private labs, not at your doctor's office yet. Now that they know how beneficial it is, they're hauling ass (hehe) on it.
We only recently figured out that natural births do better than caesarians in terms of immunity and overall health, because well, women often defecate while they give birth and apparently that's a good thing for the baby, as well as bacteria in her vagina. There's sort of an instant bacterial infusion that happens.
Give it 20 years and there'll probably be bespoke treatments available for the masses, so I won't have to listen to my boss give his daily update on his IBS.
You would think that we should have caught on sooner considering how there are plenty of mammals, like rabbits, that need to eat their moms poop to get the proper bacteria in their own guts in order to survive. Otherwise they simply die.
The biomes are what it says - not one species, not a few of them, whole fucking biomes! There are thousands and thousands species, bacterial worlds inside of us, and the species interact in complicated ways. It's not just the presence or absence of a species that is beneficial, it's often a question of combination of species that makes a huge difference. As was said, we're just beginning to understand. But I'd bet any treatment that makes the system simple will have some serious downsides that will appear later, when we know better.
Yeah there would be serious dangers to creating a synthetic biome, but theoretically it should be possible to vastly improve through actual engineering instead of natural selection. And it should be easier than doing any genetic engineering on a human genome, because you could create a more simple model for a single celled biome with specific input and output chemicals. I imagine LLMs could help with creating the map of inputs and outputs, then generate candidates to refine. But I understand we still don't even have a scientific model for a single cell.
Like produce everything a human needs just from sugars, fats and some minerals. That's not the way to do it but in an extreme case you could. Maybe we could even engineer to digest cellulose.
Of course you'd want a quick and easy killswitch and be able to replace a synthetic gut biome it with a natural gut biome again. And you'd want some kind of "predator species" that kills any foreign bacteria, like in any biome.