• Question: What nicknacks do bacteria use in our guts to survive?

    Asked by anon-254933 to Sabrina on 20 May 2020.
    • Photo: Sabrina Slater

      Sabrina Slater answered on 20 May 2020:

      Hey Thalia and Theo! Great question. Bacteria that live in our guts can be divided into two groups:

      1) harmless guys that help us digest food and protect us from…
      2) disease-causing bacteria that have evolved to make what we call “virulence factors” (this is just a fancy way of saying toxins).

      So for the harmless guys, they use proteins to feed off the sugars and fats in our diet. They can also survive where there’s nearly no air, because they form a barrier to protect our guts from invaders.
      On the other hand, harmful bacteria have loads of nasty tricks. They can stick around for ages in what we call biofilms (like the plaque on your teeth!), which lets them “talk” to one another better and makes them harder for drugs like antibiotics to reach them. They can also make tails to help them swim around (these are called flagella and look super cool under the microscope!), they can hide from the body’s immune system by camouflaging themselves, and they can chuck out toxic proteins that harm our organs… tricky stuff!

Comments