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. And even if these kids get to munch on protein-rich food, some don’t recover.
A team of scientists, led by Jeff Gordon at the Washington University School of Medicine, has shown that children with kwashiorkor harbour 11 species of gut bacteria that, together with their poor diets, conspire to damage their guts.
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.
The team 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? The twins had the same genes. They ate the same food. They lived in the same village. But their gut microbes were very different.
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But which microbes are important? Is it the entire community, with its hundreds or thousands of species? Or does the problem lie with a smaller cabal? To find out, Gordon relied on an antibody called IgA. Immune cells release this substance into the gut, where it piles onto microbes to create immobilising coats. Around half the bacteria in our gut are restrained in this way. By looking for these targeted species, “you can use the immune system to mine the microbiota,” says Gordon.
Read full, original article: Fishing For the Microbes Behind Malnutrition
