Every one of us has a unique microbiome - bacteria of many types that have colonized our skin, our gut and every part of our body since we were in the womb - that contribute to our health and sometimes disease.
The good bacteria play an invisible but essential role in our bodies, contributing to the proper functioning of our digestive tract and immune system and as a first-line defense against the bad bacteria (or disease microbes). It's important to maintain the right balance in the microbiome, which is why Carlotta Ronda, a principal investigator in UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute, is using CRISPR gene editing to tweak these bacteria in ways that improve our health (think probiotics) or help us fight infections.
In this 101 in 101 video, a series from UC Berkeley that challenges campus experts to distill their work into only 101 seconds, Ronda explains how CRISPR microbiome editing works, and their ultimate goal: to engineer our microbiome for optimal health.
"Microbiome editing is the ability to genetically modify bacteria in our gut," she said. Since the number of microbial cells in our microbiome exceeds the number of cells in our body, "genetically speaking, we are more bacterial than human."
She and her colleagues were the first to directly disable an entire gene in the gut microbiome - in this case, a mouse microbiome - and then introduce a new gene that helped the mouse's immune system fight infection. She has also edited microbes in the guts of mice to stimulate release of GLP-1, which protects the gut barrier and accelerates tissue healing.
"If you think about the genetic diversity we have in our gut, they are little factories that are constantly producing a lot of metabolites. They affect our immune system, how we age, everything. So we are trying to reprogram them for our health," Ronda said. "It's a gene therapy of the microbiome."
The techniques that Ronda and her IGI colleagues are creating will eventually transform microbiome editing into a new type of therapy for many disorders.
Watch more 101 in 101 videos featuring UC Berkeley faculty and experts here.
