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| (Image from katygastro.com) |
The Yale team...found that the beneficial gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron responded to starvation for carbon — a main building block for all cells — by sequestering a portion of the molecules for an essential transcription factor within a membrane-less compartment...My college roommates who were going to medical school said that molecular biology was their toughest course, and the preceding paragraph is an example of the concepts they had to deal with. Far be it from this non-STEM major to understand bacterial transcription and membrane-less compartments, but I am able to figure out from the article that if one is starving in general, then one is starving for carbon.
An awareness of these membrane-less compartments actually goes back a hundred years, [Yale geneticist Eduardo] Groisman said. [Postdoctoral fellow Aimilia] Krypotou’s key insight, he said, was to deduce novel properties for the bacterial transcription factor — termed Rho — based on the extra region. Sequestration of the transcription factor takes place by a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation, a ubiquitous phenomenon present in a wide variety of cells including those of humans.
The bottom line is that this research provides yet another reason--gut health--to go on a fasting diet.
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