At almost any supermarket, you can pick up both antibacterial soap and probiotic yogurt during the same shopping trip.
In a recent study, published on March 12 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, researchers found that beneficial gut bacteria were necessary for the development of innate immune cells—specialized types of white blood cells that serve as the body’s first line of defense against invading pathogens.
In addition to circulating in the blood, reserve stores of immune cells are also kept in the spleen and in the bone marrow. When researchers looked at the immune cell populations in these areas in so-called germ-free mice, born without gut bacteria, and in healthy mice with a normal population of microbes in the gut, they found that germ-free mice had fewer immune cells—specifically macrophages, monocytes, and neutrophils—than healthy mice.
Germ-free mice also had fewer granulocyte and monocyte progenitor cells, stemlike cells that can eventually differentiate into a few types of mature immune cells. And the innate immune cells that were in the spleen were defective—never fully reaching the proportions found in healthy mice with a diverse population of gut microbes.
Consider the First Source!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word choreographed an assembly of amino acids into an exquisite array of specific proteins. Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” In so doing God demonstrated a penchant for genomic writing, preceeded by an amazing series of prebiotic events, in a highly orchestrated presentation of evolutionary overcontrol.
