November 2022, Swiss scientists have opened a long-awaited package from rural Ethiopia. It was full of shit.
Public health researcher Abdifatah Muhummed, as part of a global effort to catalog and conserve human gut bacterial diversity, has been studying 2 I was collecting stool samples for months. He split each sample into his four tubes and froze them at -80 degrees Celsius, of which he shipped two to Europe.
Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms live in the digestive tract. Many of them are beneficial to human health, for example affecting metabolism and the immune system. However, that diversity is under threat from industrialization, urbanization and environmental change.
When Muhammad analyzed some of the samples collected, he cultured them in Petri dishes and added dyes to make them visible under a microscope. He was amazed to find signs of antibiotic resistance even in samples taken from children who had never been exposed to modern antibiotics.
That’s one reason scientists want to create a global biobank—a sort of Noah’s Ark of microbes—to permanently store samples from around the world before it’s too late. “Of course, it’s hard to say exactly what we’re missing,” says Zurich-based microbiologist Adrian Egli, who was part of the founding team for the Microbiota Vault project.
Faecal samples from pastoralists are of particular interest to scientists because diet affects the human microbiome. “Their lifestyle is completely different from people living in cities and urban areas,” says Zigziga University, the Swiss Institute of Tropical Public Health and the Swiss National University, collecting more than 350 samples of him as part of a joint study. says PhD candidate Muhammad. Basel.
Since pastoralists rely on milk as their staple food, their diets are rich in fatty acids. But pastoralists are by nature nomadic, and have been explored in health studies to move herds of sheep, goats and camels among the few pastures left after years of drought in East Africa. It was rare. They have little access to medical care.
As more people move to cities, they adopt new eating habits and are exposed to different environments.Ethiopian pastoralists have also started buying food items such as rice and pasta, Muhammad said. This can change the composition of your microbiome and cause the specialized bacteria that live in your gut to become extinct.
The Microbiota Vault could one day permanently store tens of thousands of stool samples from healthy people around the world to ensure that many types of bacteria are not permanently lost. They can even be revived and cultured to treat diseases in the distant future.
There are already dozens of stool banks and a number of ongoing efforts by researchers to sequence the human microbiome, all of which may want to vault samples as a backup. Like Noah’s Ark, the contributing researcher divides the sample into two specimens. One for vault and one for him to keep locally (supplier retains ownership of all samples). “It’s a give and take, a win-win for both sides. We provide the infrastructure, but at some point the sequencer can also access the data,” he says Egli. Meanwhile, the Microbiota Vault project team aims to document and publish sequence data in a standardized format to facilitate international research.
It remains to be determined where the actual vault, which is now a freezer in Egli’s lab at the University of Zurich, will be built. It could be part of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, or it could be a converted military bunker in the Alps. Switzerland’s political stability, excellent infrastructure, and links with international organizations such as the World Health Organization in Geneva make it a suitable candidate. The $1 million funding will cover the pilot phase of the project through 2024.
To bring their vision to life, Egli and his colleagues must first test which freezing techniques and preservatives are best for keeping bacteria alive long-term. will discover this when the is unpacked and sequenced again two years later. “Then we will know which methods are best suited to maintain microbial diversity,” he says.
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2023 issue of WIRED UK Magazine.
