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Bacteria follow commands

23.01.2017

Scientists were able to control the work of bacteria with the help of light. With the application of knowledge in the field of synthetic biology and genetic engineering, the process of controlling the vital activity of E. coli became possible.

According to scientists, bacteria, which will be programmed in the right way, can bring benefits to human health. Feeling some deviations from the norm, the bacteria can either compensate for the imbalance, or warn the person about the upcoming disease. In their work, scientists used a special method using redox molecules. With the help of redox processes, molecules were able to exchange electrons.

For experiments, scientists used bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli). These bacteria are very sensitive to oxidative reactions. The scientific experiment consisted in the fact that the electrode was immersed in a solution with Escherichia coli bacteria.

When the electrode was positively charged, some of the redox molecules activated, stimulating the reaction of microbes to the reagent. With a negative charge of the electrode, the redox molecules ceased their action. The goal of turning bacteria on and off was achieved by scientists in this way.

An important result was achieved by minimal costs. In the future, these developments are planned to be officially recognized, over the course of 1-2 years some more scientific tests will be carried out to fix the achieved goal in general.

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Intestinal bacteria control the intestinal clock 11.10.2019

When we talk about the biological clock that controls the daily activity of cells, organs and the body as a whole, we must always remember that we have quite a lot of these clocks: there are central ones that are in the brain, and there are peripheral ones that control individual organs and systems. organs. And, for example, it depends on the intestinal clock how nutrients will be absorbed depending on the time of day.

But in the gut, as we know, lives a colossal mass of symbiotic bacteria that help us digest food (and not only). It can be assumed that the intestinal microflora somehow affects the intestinal clock, and indeed, studies have shown that it does - if all bacteria were removed from the intestine, its daily rhythms were upset.

But how exactly do bacteria affect the intestinal biological clock? Most likely, microbes secrete some substances that act on genes, on which the course of the internal clock depends. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center describe in their article in Science differences in gene activity in intestinal cells taken from normal mice and in intestinal cells taken from mice without microflora.

The HDAC3 gene encodes an enzyme that attaches an acetyl chemical group to histone protein molecules. These proteins serve as DNA packers, and it depends on them whether it will be possible to read information from DNA or not; in other words, the activity of genes depends on histones. But the behavior of the histones themselves depends on chemical modifications, including modifications by acetyl groups. This means that by adding or reducing the amount of the HDAC3 enzyme, changing its activity, you can thereby change the work of many genes. (Changing gene activity through histones is one way of epigenetic regulation.)

It depends on bacteria whether the HDAC3 enzyme will bind to histones on certain genes, and whether these genes will be available at certain times of the day to read the information recorded in them. That is, bacteria created a daily rhythm in the activity of intestinal genes, acting through the epigenetic mechanism of regulation, through histones. At the same time, the same HDAC3 depended on the work of the mouse clock gene, in other words, the daily rhythm of the intestine depended both on its own biological clock mechanism and on bacteria (which, probably, was to be expected).

It is likely that the HDAC3 enzyme helped the histones to unpack and repack the genes that control the digestion and breakdown of nutrients in a timely manner. However, one such gene that HDAC3 acts directly on is the Cd36 gene, which helps absorb lipids. The HDAC3 enzyme itself, without the help of histones, binds to the Cd36 gene and activates it. It can be assumed that if HDAC3 falls out of the rhythm, this can lead to obesity - due to the activity of Cd36, fats will begin to be absorbed too much and not on schedule.

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