Now Pili's team of chemists, biologists, engineers, and designers is cultivating the "Pili microbe palette," a collection of microorganisms that have been engineered to produce pigments in a variety of colors.
Fish in 'silver' condition (i.e., fresh to the river) were transported to 8000-L experimentanksatks athehe DFO Cultus Lake Salmon Research Laboratory, Cultus Lake, BC and a subset of these fish (n = 9) were destructively sampled to assess microbe load upon collection.
Dr. Klenk and his colleagues in Germany plucked the microbes from their collection and reared them in huge numbers, split open the cells and isolated long fragments of DNA from them.
As a positive control for the depletion verification assay, and to enumerate cultivable microbes with the fecal collection procedure, fecal pellets from untreated mice were collected with the above described procedure.
The collection of microbes included C. difficile, infections with which can cause life-threatening diarrhoea.
And each person's collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person's.
While the mucus itself helps protect fish from harmful bacteria, fungi and viruses, the team are interested in the collection of microbes it is home to – the so-called microbiome – and the substances it produces.
For instance, one study found that emulsifiers, a common category of food additive found in industrial breads and baked goods, may promote intestinal inflammation by disrupting the barrier between the immune system and the microbiome – the collection of microbes that inhabit our bodies.
"This is a vivid example of not only how the microbiome is affecting things all over your body, but of how we can leverage that to improve health," said Sonnenburg, using a term for the collection of microbes living on or inside an animal, or in a particular part.
