SCIENTIFIC NEWS The last group saw a full reversal of antibiotics effect. Reseeded with their own faecal material, the patients’ microbiomes returned to normal in just a few days. But those taking probiotics had a very different reaction. Generic probiotics did well at colonising the gut, which makes sense since the indigenous
Suez, J. Zmora, N. ZilbermanSchapira, G. Halpern, Z. Segal, E. Elinav, E. et al. (2018). PostAntibiotic Gut Mucosal Microbiome Reconstitution Is Impaired by Probiotics and Improved by Autologous FMT. Cell, 174(6): 14061423. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.08.047
the ulcers grew healthy skin within 18 days. Over time, the epithelia expanded and connected to the surrounding skin, even in large ulcers. At three and six months later, the generated cells behaved like healthy skin cells in several molecular, genetic and cellular tests. APJ
While healing deep ulcers on mice, it remains a long way to replicate this in humans and of course more studies are needed to optimise the technique and begin testing it in additional ulcer models. Yet it remains a remarkable achievement. What the researcher have done is to make skin where there was no skin to start with. Kurita, M. Araoka, T. Hishida, T. O’Keefe, D. Takahashi, Y. Sakamoto, A. Sakurai, M. Suzuki, K. Wu, J. Yamamoto, M. Hernandez-Benitez, R. Ocampo, A. Reddy, P. Shokhirev, M. Magistretti, P. Delicado, E. Eto, H. Harii, K. Belmonte. J. (2018). In vivo reprogramming of wound-resident cells generates skin epithelial tissue. Nature, 561: 243–247; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0477-4 APJ
microbiome was at least partially wiped out by antibiotics, but the probiotics significantly prohibited the natural biome from recovering and returning to its natural state. Even six months after the treatment, these patients’ natural biomes had not fully recovered, suggesting offthe-shelf replacement bacteria aren’t a great substitute for the wider diversity of natural microbiome. A probiotic has maybe seven or eight strains and the literature supports the benefits of them, however the gut has an entire rainforest that’s being affected in different ways by different antibiotics, and you can’t just patch that up by giving a probiotic. Diversity does seem to be a key to its successes, and a couple of strains in a probiotic is not going to help much. Many think that taking a probiotic for a health issue will help, and while it may not harm, it may not be of much help.
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RESEARCHERS TURN OPEN WOUNDS INTO SKIN Scientists at the Salk Institute have developed a technique to directly convert the cells in an open wound into new skin cells. The approach relies on reprogramming the cells to a stem-cell-like state and could be useful for healing skin damage and to countering the effects of skin ageing. Epithelial tissues were generated by converting one cell type, mesenchymal cells to basal keratinocytes. After much trial and error, they identified four ‘reprogramming factors’ (RNA molecules) that were involved in defining the distinct identity of the basal keratinocytes. When the team topically treated skin ulcers on mice with the four factors,
ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION INDEX Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA)