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+--- Thread: Article Fish have a brain microbiome. Could humans have one too? (/thread-16948.html)
Fish have a brain microbiome. Could humans have one too? - C C - Dec 3, 2024
RELATED (The Guardian): The brain microbiome: could understanding it help prevent dementia?
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Fish have a brain microbiome. Could humans have one too?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/fish-have-a-brain-microbiome-could-humans-have-one-too-20241202/
INTRO: Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose and gut. But scientists have long assumed that bacteria can’t survive in the human brain. The powerful blood-brain barrier, the thinking goes, keeps the organ mostly free from outside invaders. But are we sure that a healthy human brain doesn’t have a microbiome of its own?
Over the last decade, initial studies have presented conflicting evidence. The idea has remained controversial, given the difficulty of obtaining healthy, uncontaminated human brain tissue that could be used to study possible microbial inhabitants.
Recently, a study published in Science Advances provided the strongest evidence yet that a brain microbiome can and does exist in healthy vertebrates — fish, specifically. Researchers at the University of New Mexico discovered communities of bacteria thriving in salmon and trout brains. Many of the microbial species have special adaptations that allow them to survive in brain tissue, as well as techniques to cross the protective blood-brain barrier.
, a physiologist who studies the human microbiome at the University of Colorado, Boulder and was not involved with the study, is “inherently skeptical” of the idea that populations of microbes could live in the brain, he said. But he found the new research convincing. “This is concrete evidence that brain microbiomes do exist in vertebrates,” he said. “And so the idea that humans have a brain microbiome is not outlandish.”
While fish physiology is, in many ways, similar to humans’, there are some key differences. Still, “it certainly puts another weight on the scale to think about whether this is relevant to mammals and us,” said Christopher Link, who studies the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disease at the University of Colorado, Boulder and was also not involved in the work.
The human gut microbiome plays a critical role in the body, communicating with the brain and maintaining the immune system through the gut-brain axis. So it isn’t totally far-fetched to suggest that microbes could play an even larger role in our neurobiology... (MORE - details, only light ads)