The human relationship with microbial life is complicated. At almost any supermarket, you can pick up both antibacterial soap and probiotic yogurt during the same shopping trip. Although there are types of bacteria that can make us sick, Caltech professor of biology and biological engineering Dr. Sarkis Mazmanian and his team are most interested in the thousands of other bacteria—many already living inside our bodies—that actually keep us healthy. His past work in mice has shown that restoring populations of beneficial bacteria can help alleviate the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, and even autism. Now, he and his team have found that these good bugs might also prepare the immune cells in our blood to fight infections from harmful bacteria. In the recent study, published on March 12, 2014 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, the researchers found that beneficial gut bacteria were necessary for the development of innate immune cells—specialized types of white blood cells that serve as the body's first line of defense against invading pathogens. In addition to circulating in the blood, reserve stores of immune cells are also kept in the spleen and in the bone marrow. When the researchers looked at the immune cell populations in these areas in so-called germ-free mice, born without gut bacteria, and in healthy mice with a normal population of microbes in the gut, they found that germ-free mice had fewer immune cells—specifically macrophages, monocytes, and neutrophils—than healthy mice. Germ-free mice also had fewer granulocyte and monocyte progenitor cells, stemlike cells that can eventually differentiate into a few types of mature immune cells. And the innate immune cells that were in the spleen were defective—never fully reaching the proportions found in healthy mice with a diverse population of gut microbes.Login Or Register To Read Full Story