sallyg said:
What if we discover a common disease is due to lack of a certain organism in the gut.? Like when they discovered the essential role of some vitamins.
While not clearly causative there have been correlations made lately in this area. It is my understanding that transplanting bacterial laden matter from one persons gut to another is an accepted medical practice!
People are holobionts and we get a lot of our microbes from our mothers.
It is also interesting how symbiotes and parasites are related evolutionary phenomena.
It is assumed that many of these relationships began originally with predation like behavior.
Consider fungi for instance, basidiomycota fungi often carry bacteria on their hyphal tips and the fungi have enzymes for eating bacteria. The fungi propagate and eat their own microbes, which help them digest various materials.
The lichen arrangement is incredibly similar, except the fungi get nutrition from the bacteria, which eat light and the fungi have learned to not eat the bacteria, here cyanobacteria. In some lichen other bacteria, like those that can fix atmospheric nitrogen, are also known to occur. This complex relationship allows lichen to even digest rocks slowly over time and also involves an amazing chemical diversity that is still being explored.
Things like mitochondria and plasmids are even considered organisms that merged into other organisms over time through horizontal transmission and symbiosis. Such events play major roles in the past and present evolution of life on Earth.
Populations of distinct organisms in symbiosis can become a single organism, often through a step including obligate parasitism! Some of what we know as lichens now may even one day give rise to new types of plant like organisms over the next several hundred million years. I've been reading a bit obsessively on the topic lately. You could even say I took a
Lichen to it.
