Malnutrition seems like an intuitive problem: you don’t eat enough food, so your health suffers. But it’s not that simple. One mysterious type of malnutrition known as kwashiorkor—characterised by leaky blood vessels, puffy limbs, distended stomachs, and fragile skin—often affects children who eat just as much as their healthy neighbours.
A team of scientists, led by Jeff Gordon at the Washington University School of Medicine first started studying kwashiorkor in Malawi a few years ago, after noticing that some children developed the condition while their identical twins did not. Why the difference? Turns out, their gut microbes were very different.
The team identified a set of 11 species that when transplanted into mice only harmed animals that ate a Malawian diet. These included three Enterobacteriaceae, and several common gut inhabitants like Bacteroides fragilis and Bacteroides thetaiotamicron. Individually, these microbes did very little. Collectively, they led to shredded guts and severe weight loss. These results suggest that this particular type of malnutrition isn’t just caused by the absence of food, but also by the presence of the wrong microbes.
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The team then used the same techniques to show that healthy twins, who don’t get kwashiorkor, have guts that are rich in two particular bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila and Clostridium scindens. The team are now trying to understand how the 11 microbes that they identified damage the gut, and how C.scindens and A.muciniphila thwart them.
Read full, original article: Fishing For the Microbes Behind Malnutrition
