Bacteria are cool. They can do all sorts of things that you might not normally think about as you kill millions of them with your favorite antibacterial soap. Some bacteria can break down and eat toxic wastes. Some bacteria can use sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow. Some bacteria can even be used to create medicinal compounds. Although we know a lot about what bacteria can do, we still need to learn a lot more in order to effectively solve the world’s problems. Bacteria are everywhere and will therefore somehow be involved or interact with any technique used to solve problems like global warming or disease.
Importantly for this post, it’s estimated that there are TRILLIONS of bacteria throughout the human gut and we are far from understanding all of the beneficial and dangerous things they can do. As a small but meaningful step in the right direction, researchers from Yale University recently discovered that bacteria in the human gut can grab and use vitamin B12 coming from our food. Essentially, these bacterial pirates can steal vitamin B12 that would otherwise be absorbed in the small intestine, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
To steal vitamin B12, these bacteria create a protein that latches onto the vitamin really tightly thus allowing the bacteria to pull the vitamin into their cells and use it for growth. While they may be pirating some vitamin B12 from us, these bacteria also don’t survive well in the gut if they lose the ability to steal from us. Given that these bacteria likely play important roles in helping us digest foods and maintain healthy mixtures of bacteria in the gut, we can forgive them a little bit of pirating.
Now that researchers know how these bacteria grab onto vitamin B12, they might be able to use this knowledge to prevent the bacteria from stealing B12 in humans who don’t get enough B12. They could also potentially use this information to create new therapeutic bacteria that are better at surviving in the gut. For example, if researchers wanted to engineer bacteria that could live in the gut and create a nutrient for us, they might give the engineered bacteria the ability to steal B12 so that they are better at surviving in the gut. The researchers could also make it so they could shut off the stealing ability. If things started to go wrong, the researchers would just shut off the bacteria’s stealing ability and they’d be eliminated from gut.
As you can see, many new opportunities have been opened up simply from learning a little bit more about what bacteria can do. At first glance, the ability to steal B12 from us seems like it must be a bad thing, but, not only does this ability help useful bacteria survive inside of us, it potentially gives researchers new ways to manipulate bacteria for beneficial purposes.
I’m hoping to write more about cool bacteria and all the things they can do in the future so stay tuned!
References
Wexler, Aaron G., et al. “Human gut Bacteroides capture vitamin B12 via cell surface-exposed lipoproteins.” eLife 7 (2018): e37138. Pubmed PMID: 30226189. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6143338.