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Life forms unknown to science live in the human intestine

22.11.2015

A new genetic analysis of human gut bacteria has yielded some very unexpected results. It turns out that such strange creatures live in our intestines that some biologists claim that this is a completely new form of life, still unknown to science.

Of course, such statements should be taken with a certain degree of skepticism, but they still have certain grounds. Over the past decade, new technologies for studying the genome have allowed scientists for the first time to explore our own microbiomes - those collections of invisible micro-creatures that live in and on us. Microbiome research is literally rewriting the textbooks of human biology right now as scientists discover that everything from our mouths to guts to skin is a complex and diverse ecosystem. According to some estimates, there are more microbes in our body than cells.

Scientists Philippe Lopez and Eric Bateste at Pierre and Marie Curie University have developed a new method to identify the most distinct life forms in the gut microbiome, namely by examining 86 gene families that rarely pass from organism to organism. Such genes could in theory be used to distribute life forms into three known biological domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes.

As a result, geneticists came up with very unexpected results: about a third of the marker genes studied by Lopez and Batest do not belong to any domain known to man. Does this mean that we have opened the fourth domain right under our noses (or rather, inside it, so to speak)? Maybe. But there are other versions. First, these specific marker genes may be more variable than we know. After all, we are only just beginning to understand the degree of genetic diversity in the microbial world. There is also the possibility that in an environment as isolated as the human gut, natural selection has led to a new level of genetic diversity never before seen anywhere.

In order to really answer whether there are representatives of a completely new branch of the evolutionary tree in our guts, it is necessary to isolate and study organisms with these strange genes. Such a task will not be easy, since we still do not know how to cultivate most microbes in the laboratory. But the prospects are so exciting that geneticists, of course, will try to do it.

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