Paul Kubes is a University of Calgary expert in infections, inflammation and chronic diseases.Riley Brandt
Your gut is a microbiome. A city of bacteria. And it could be key to understanding a host of medical conditions that affect the brain, from depression to autism, says Paul Kubes, a University of Calgary expert in infections, inflammation and chronic diseases.
It's a connection he aims to probe further at the Western Canadian Microbiome Centre – a new research facility dedicated to studying micro-organisms that's set to open at the university in 2017. In July, Ottawa pledged $9.9-million to the project.
What are microbiomes and what do we know about them?
In our gut, we have a whole city of bacteria – all kinds of different bacteria, all doing different things. And they sort of co-survive together. And they form what I would argue is the largest organ in the body. They're made up of about 300 trillion cells, and anything we do, they sort of respond in various ways.
It's almost like identifying a new organ in the body. It's an organ that seems to be very sensitive to any kind of change and then it responds in various ways. A microbiome is really a community of bacteria that all live together.
I think our state of knowledge is actually quite poor. If you gave somebody a read-out of their microbiome, their 300 most-popular bacteria, I don't think there's a person on Earth that can tell you what it means.
How will the Western Canadian Microbiome Centre help?
It's a project we've been working on to bring together the technologies and the facilities to be able to study microbiomes in humans, in animals, in oil sands, in agriculture, to really begin to understand what microbiomes do in all these different systems.
Altogether this will be a $50-million project, bringing in brand new equipment for things that we just haven't been able to do until now. One of the things that we really want to study is how does the microbiome allow your immune system to develop.
How well do scientists understand the gut and its impact on the brain?
People described gut microbiome probably 200 years ago, but nobody realized it actually did anything. I think, only in the last five years, we're beginning to realize that it's an incredibly important part of our well-being.
You can imagine if you get the wrong bacteria producing the wrong molecules, and this is stimulating neurons inappropriately, you could have horrific changes in the brain. And so now, things like depression, things like autism – these are all possibly to some extent affected by microbiome.
What sort of practical applications will flow from your research?
One thing I think is really, really important is we're using antibiotics all the time. And probably the best example of it is with modern medicine, babies are being born younger and younger, more and more immature. But we know that those kids are going to get infections, and we've got to protect against that. So we give them a bunch of antibiotics.
But what we do in the process is change their microbiome for the long-term. And so these kids, we now are beginning to realize, are getting allergies, asthma and all these other things that set them up for a life of chronic disease.
It's something that we're very, very interested in. I'm not advocating we don't take antibiotics, but we need to be able to switch back to a healthy microbiome, and I think that's an area we'd really like to look at.
You mentioned oil sands. What's the tie-in there?
There's a fantastic microbiome living between the oil and the water in the oil sands. It's a layer of bacteria – all kinds of different species we really don't even know about. They're making all kinds of different molecules.
Some of our geoscientists are now taking samples and beginning to isolate molecules and we're testing them just to see if any of them have an anti-microbial activity. It's a microbiome that lives there. It's part of the biosphere and it's the largest microbiome on Earth. It really has great potential.
This interview has been edited and condensed.