Research and innovation

The power of microbes

Issued: Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:16:00 GMT

Dr Chris Quince is in for the count. His research into the behaviour of microbial communities involves being able to accurately catalogue bacterial cells so small that the numbers involved are staggering: you could expect to find around a hundred billion of them in just a millilitre of a human gut.

data on screen  'One thing I'm involved with is human microbiomics, which is the study of microbial communities that are living on or in you,' he explains. 'It's only with the DNA revolution that we've been able to properly study these communities. It's estimated that you have ten times as many bacterial cells as you have human cells, which is significant, although obviously the bacterial cells are much smaller. And what's more interesting than the sheer numbers, is that it's a diverse community. Humans only have 10,000 genes, whereas estimates are that microbes living in or on humans have 100 to 1,000 times that many genes.'

Dr Quince has recently been involved in the process of cataloguing the microbial communities of two individuals that shows them to host a total of 800 species. But why would you want to be able to catalogue or predict the behaviour of these sorts of communities?

'When your bacterial community isn't functioning correctly, it is associated with various diseases, such as Crohn's,' he says. 'But also in your general wellbeing and health, they play an important role in the immune system.' Research that Dr Quince's collaborators have undertaken in the US has shown differences in the microbial communities of obese and lean people, for example, with links being made between a particular type of bacterial flora and the ability to convert food into fat.

Research like this might seem unusual for an academic working within the School of Engineering, but Dr Quince explains that it's not only in the human body where microbial communities can have an impact. In terms of environmental engineering, these communities also play a critical role in, for example, waste water treatment and the cleaning of polluted landscapes.

He is working with colleagues Professor William Sloan and Dr Gavin Collins as part of the University's Water & Environment Research Group, which brings together experts in bioinformatics, metagenomics, mathematical modelling, systems biology and environmental engineering.

'I have two postgraduate students who are doing experimental projects in this area,' Dr Quince explains. 'One is on microbial fuel cells: effectively what they do is to turn waste into electricity; which is quite exciting. The other project is funded by a Kelvin Smith Scholarship and that's on a form of water treatment called a slow sand filter. This is a microbial community that works to remove pathogens from water. Both of these projects have the potential to solve some of the problems facing society in terms of reducing the carbon cost of sanitation, because if we can understand how these communities function, we can optimise the systems.'

Due to technological advances, research of this kind has only become possible quite recently, says Dr Quince. 'We are using sophisticated molecular biology techniques to analyse the communities, which takes a degree of specialist equipment for extracting DNA from these communities and manipulating it in various ways. It's a bit like forensic science, where you can look for tiny traces of human DNA and determine who was at a crime scene. We are looking for traces of microbial DNA to determine what microbes are present in a system.

'We have only managed to get a large amount of data from these communities in the last five years, and it's on an exponential growth curve. There is currently a shortage of people capable of handling this sort of data, which of course means that it has huge potential for future employment opportunities.'

Find out more

Dr Chris Quince will be speaking at Microbiome in Glasgow, a one day symposium introducing developments in microbiome research. The symposium is being held on the 24th April 2012,

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