New findings overturn 100-year-old assumption about common bacteria in the lungs
The human body is teeming with more than 35 trillion bacteria, coexisting in microbiomes inside the gut, mouth, lungs, skin and urogenital tract. While it's now clear these microbes are associated with health and disease, scientists have only begun to uncover the full scale of their biology and functions.
Recent research from the University of Michigan challenges a long-held belief about a common lung bacterium, Prevotella melaninogenica. This bacterium, typically found in the respiratory tract, has been thought to be an obligate anaerobe, meaning it could not survive in the presence of oxygen. However, a new study has found that P. melaninogenica can grow at oxygen levels as low as 5–8% and can briefly survive in an environment with 21% oxygen.
This suggests that the bacterium may have mechanisms to tolerate oxygen that were previously unknown. The study, led by Ariangela Kozik, an asthma researcher, used a new real-time sensor platform and RNA sequencing to analyze how P. melaninogenica consumes oxygen and deals with oxidative stress and DNA damage differently than other aerobic bacteria.
Kozik's team hopes to further investigate how the immune system responds to this bacterium and how it affects the body, potentially paving the way for more targeted therapies for respiratory diseases.
Written by urgent.news from Phys.org's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
