CROHN鈥橲 disease might be caused by bacteria that have borrowed a few nasty genes from, of all things, plague.
is an incurable inflammation of the intestine that affects 1 in 1000 people in Europe and North America. Researchers suspected gut bacteria were to blame, but could not be sure which, as tests often produced contradictory results. Now Ken Simpson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have discovered a possible reason for the confusion.
When they studied bacteria from the guts of people with inflamed small intestines, they found no evidence of MAP, a bacterium that some have blamed for 颁谤辞丑苍鈥檚. MAP is related to the TB bacterium.
Advertisement
However, they did find higher than normal levels of the common gut bacteria E. coli in more inflamed areas. These E.coli uniquely carry disease-related genes from a host of other pathogens, including salmonella, cholera and bubonic plague, as well as from strains of E. coli that cause disease outside the gut (The ISME Journal, ).
