Needed: Noah’s Ark for microbes
News:
- Scientists have warned that humanity is facing a health crisis as many of the beneficial microbes that inhabit people’s bodies are being eradicated by antibiotics and processed diets.
Important Facts:
- In a paper published in the journal ‘Science’ scientists laid out their ambitious vision to deal with a problem of preserving human microbiota which is compared to climate change in severity.
3.Scientists noted that industrialisation is strongly linked with a decline in microbiota diversity. For example, hunter gatherers living in remote Amazonian villages had twice the number of microbes living in their guts as the average American.
- To preserve the microscopic life for future generations, scientists have called for a “Noah’s Ark” of germs to be collected from people in untouched corners of the world who have not been impacted by modern society.
5.The model for such a scheme is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a bank storing crops and plants from around the world to prepare for a doomsday scenario.
- The scientists also noted that socalled biobanking initiatives are springing up in research institutions around the world, but most so far have only focused on samples from industrialised nations.
- Significance:
- Researchers said in the future it may be possible to prevent diseases by reintroducing lost microbes. However, for this to happen humanity’s “ancestral microbial heritage” must be preserved.
- The scientists suggested that the best way to achieve this is to collect beneficial microbes from remote Latin American and African populations.