Needed: Noah’s Ark for microbes

Needed: Noah’s Ark for microbes

News:

1. 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:

2. 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.

4. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.