Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (red) colonizing the small intestine (intestinal epithelial cells are blue and the mucus layer is green) of an antibiotic-treated mouse. (credit: Molecular Cytology Facility at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
When it comes to the human body’s trillions of microbial inhabitants, sorting the good from the bad is critical. Antibiotics are powerful weapons for obliterating nasty, disease-causing germs, but they can also take out microbial chums as collateral damage. The loss of those invisible allies can have long-term, cascading health effects, including opening opportunities for invasions by enemy microbes, such as Clostridium difficile and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE).
Fixing such a culled, out-of-whack microbial community in the human body—a condition called dysbiosis—is hard. Scientists still don’t have a firm hold on the recipe for a “healthy” microbiome, let alone know how to mend one that appears imbalanced. The closest researchers have come to such a feat is with the use of fecal transplants to restore gut communities—essentially a wholesale replacement of a wrecked microbial community with a functional one.
But now researchers may be on to a way to prevent dysbiosis in the first place.
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