Tantalizing But Preliminary Evidence of a 'Brain Microbiome'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: We know the menagerie of microbes in the gut has powerful effects on our health. Could some of these same bacteria be making a home in our brains? A poster presented here this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience drew attention with high-resolution microscope images of bacteria apparently penetrating and inhabiting the cells of healthy human brains. The work is preliminary, and its authors are careful to note that their tissue samples, collected from cadavers, could have been contaminated. But to many passersby in the exhibit hall, the possibility that bacteria could directly influence processes in the brain -- including, perhaps, the course of neurological disease -- was exhilarating.

Talking hoarsely above the din of the exhibit hall on Tuesday evening, neuroanatomist Rosalinda Roberts of The University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), told attendees about a tentative finding that, if true, suggests an unexpectedly intimate relationship between microbes and the brain. Her lab looks for differences between healthy people and those with schizophrenia by examining slices of brain tissue preserved in the hours after death. About 5 years ago, neuroscientist Courtney Walker, then an undergraduate in Roberts's lab, became fascinated by unidentified rod-shaped objects that showed up in finely detailed images of these slices, captured with an electron microscope. Roberts had seen the shapes before. 'But I just dismissed them, because I was looking for something else,' she says. 'I would say 'Oh, here are those things again.'' But Walker was persistent, and Roberts started to consult colleagues at UAB. This year, a bacteriologist gave her unexpected news: They were bacteria. Her team has now found bacteria somewhere in every brain they've checked -- 34 in all -- about half of them healthy, and half from people with schizophrenia.

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