The War in Your Gut

Everyday a war is waged inside our guts, between the bacteria and the phage or viruses that want to kill them. They’re each genetically evolving in a race to outdo the other both on earth and in space. We’ll get to that in a minute.   

Bacteria are the most abundant cellular organisms in our nutritionally rich gut, as many as one hundred trillion. That’s a lot of hosts for phages to infect. The community of phages there is called the phageome, and we’re pretty much ignorant of their role in our gut health. Our guess is there’s even more phage than bacteria there.  

Phages were first discovered in the early 1900s for their potential to treat bacterial infections. But that withered when antibiotics were discovered. Now the work is being revived with the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. From studies in the lab both on earth and the international space station, we’re learning about the battle between E.coli and T-seven, its attacking phage.  

On the ISS, with microgravity and greater radiation, T-seven was slower to infect E coli, but it mutated to infect bacteria that it normally can’t on earth. E coli also acquired new mutations that may have enhanced its ability to combat phage attacks.  

We hope to use this knowledge to develop phages to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Maybe it can also teach us how gut health is impacted by space travel. Both are attempts to improve our lives now and well into the future in a life beyond Earth.