Talk:CH391L/S13/Probiotics

• Benjamin Gilman 17:13, 18 March 2013 (EDT): 'The advent of probiotics' section is duplicated on the page. I'd get rid of the copy in your introduction.
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 23:43, 21 March 2013 (EDT): Thanks Ben, done.
• Benjamin Gilman 17:25, 18 March 2013 (EDT): As we said in class, you should explain and cite the mention of bacterial strains that cause tumors to shrink.
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 23:43, 21 March 2013 (EDT): Will do! I've gotten to interesting papers line up, so I'll sum up their findings in a few sentences. The general idea is using E.coli Nissile 1917 has been found to localize in tumor regions as shown in this paper
  • Benjamin Gilman 17:03, 22 March 2013 (EDT): I saw one of the papers with a modified k-12 E. coli strain. My concern is that injecting live E. coli into the bloodstream is likely to induce sepsis even if it localizes near tumors. It could keep you from dying of cancer...by making you die of something much worse.
• Kevin Baldridge 17:27, 18 March 2013 (EDT):I'm pretty sure it's SV40 not VS40 for the broad host range plasmid.
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 23:43, 21 March 2013 (EDT): Double checked the paper that I cited and it is correct search I even searched for literature and here is the original paper where they explain how this plasmid was constructed. Thank you anyway, as it made me find a paper that explains a bit about other food-grade molecular tools, both ideas which I will add as a new section in the page.
• Gabriel Wu 17:32, 18 March 2013 (EDT): Some good references showing fecal transplantation can cure recurrent C. difficile infections. humans mice.
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 00:31, 22 March 2013 (EDT): And too add to those here is the specific paper that made the news about fecal transplant clinical trial. Retract
  • Benjamin Gilman 19:21, 21 March 2013 (EDT): The explanation of how this works in the context of patient treatment isn't clear on the page. The problem is that extended treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics kills off many of the bacteria in a patient's digestive tract, allowing C. difficile to take hold. A fecal transplant introduces thousands(?) of species of bacteria to combat that.
  • Gabriel Wu 01:11, 22 March 2013 (EDT): Check your references, I'm pretty sure the NEJM paper is what has been making headlines. For example, this New York Times piece.
    • Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 09:56, 22 March 2013 (EDT): You know you are right.
• Gabriel Wu 17:40, 18 March 2013 (EDT): An ambitious synthetic biology application of designing a tumor killing (or destroying) bacteria. [1]
• Gabriel Wu 17:42, 18 March 2013 (EDT): You have to mention yogurt (and possibly cheese, bread, beer) have micro-organisms that have human benefits.
  • Benjamin Gilman 19:21, 21 March 2013 (EDT): Because there aren't many examples of genetically engineered microorganisms being used as probiotics, you might want to talk about some of the examples where more traditional techniques were used to alter cells used in these products. Ale yeast, for example, has been evolved to generate more esters and flocculate among other things, but that also effects the nutritional value of beer. You might also find out how Dannon found/developed the bacteria strain they use in the activia yogurt.
• Catherine I. Mortensen 21:48, 21 March 2013 (EDT): I didn't understand the first sentence under the "frontiers in probiotics: genetic modification" section so I tried to fix it so it would make more sense... you should check what i changed to make sure it says what you mean to say... Also, I don't understand how probiotics could be considered antibiotics... could you explain?
• Catherine I. Mortensen 22:05, 21 March 2013 (EDT):I know that 70% alcohol is more capable of killing bacteria because it causes the proteins in the bacteria to coagulate whereas 100% alcohol causes the proteins on the exterior of the bacteria to harden so that the alcohol is unable to actually enter the bacteria cell. I don't understand how 100% alcohol causes the proteins to harden though... why doesn't the 100% cause the degradation of proteins as well?
• Siddharth Das 00:54, 21 March 2013 (EDT): Can you add a discussion to describe how synthetically derived probiotics could live symbiotically inside human without immune response interference?
• Aurko Dasgupta 20:59, 24 March 2013 (EDT):You should replace "gnobiotic" with "gnotobiotic".