Thanks for your feedback and good luck as you move ahead with your promising project. We’ll be eager to hear the results.

Amy

thank you for your interesting article. I would just like to add that further information about MetaHIT can be found on the official website: http://www.metahit.eu.

Best,

Y. Winogradsky
MetaHIT Project Manager

Thanks for the affirmation! Aside from head pain, sleep started off as one of my biggest symptoms. It’s the first symptom I’ve had and will probably be the last to go away.

This may strain credulity, but it felt like I would go for weeks without sleeping. Maybe I’d sleep an hour, but it drove me to the point of wanting to kill myself. It couldn’t have been worse. That being said, my sleep has greatly improved. I’ve lowered my sleep meds dramatically.

Right now, I’m pretty much guaranteed to get a decent night’s sleep and every so often a fantastic one. I find myself not even thinking about sleep, which is amazing.

Along with an inability to sleep came an inability to nap, not even as a child. Over the last 6 months, I’ve found myself dozing off. The first time it happened, I didn’t even know what was going on, and it took me a while to figure out what had taken place.

Best,
Amy

This was a really great article. Gives hope.

You must be doing well to be applying for grad school. Good luck to you. Are you able to sleep any better now after being on the MP or is that symptom still a problem.

Thanks for all you do.

Yes, I went and it was great. I learned a lot and the training cleared up so many of my questions. What we learned is quite complex but I will try to summarize the main points in a piece. I’ll probably have it up by next week. Right now I’m doing GRE studying as the test is coming up, so I’m writing the piece slowly.

Best,

Amy

Looking forward to hearing how the training program went.

Gene

You said:
“Happily next week I will be attending a training session at the J. Craig Venter Institute (his team sequenced the human genome and is now working on bacterial genes) where I will learn how to use several of the latest sequencing tools I’m excited!?

Thanks so much for sharing! I’m not familiar with Dr. Callahan’s work but his book seems quite interesting. Amazing how so much of “our” DNA is really pathogen DNA isn’t it?

I’m not sure that I agree with his statement that our parasites are very important to our overall health. While some of the pathogens we harbor may prove beneficial to different people under different circumstances a lot of them are also to blame for chronic inflammatory disease.

It will be very exciting as the advent of molecular technology allows scientists to learn so much more about bacteria and the different roles they play in health and disease.

Best,

Amy

“Only about 10% of the billion letters is part of human genes. That adds up to about 30,000 genes for each of us. Far, far fewer than most of us expected, but even more interesting, most of the DNA inside of human chromosomes isn’t human at all. More than half of the DNA in our chromosomes got there as a result of infection. Inside each of us, there is more viral DNA than DNA in human genes. Nearly 8% of our DNA is intact viral genomes. Another 40-50% is viral fragments. A particular group of viruses, called retroviruses, gave us these genes. “

“Even the mammalian placenta, the flesh that ties us to our mothers for nine months, was a gift of a retroviral infection. Placental mammals have a gene called Peg10 which is not found in marsupials. Mice who lack the Peg10 gene do not produce normal placentas and their fetuses die very early during development. So it appears that Peg10 is essential for the development of a normal mammalian placenta. Peg10 is derived from a type of gene known as a retrotransposon. Some retrotransposons, like Peg10, are remnants of retroviruses.”

“When people looked at the sequence of the human genome, they noticed another interesting feature. It appeared that more than 220 of the genes inside of human cells came from bacteria.”

He has much to say about how important infections are to our overall health. No question on his part! Some examples:

“Scientists created the first germ-free mice more than 50 years ago. Unexpectedly, the cecum in germ-free mice swelled up to several times its normal size. And in a few mice, the cecum became so large that the small intestine wrapped around itself, and the mice died. Just why a lack of bacteria causes cecal swelling isn’t clear, but it is clear that these mice died from lack of infection. Mice without germs don’t develop normal intestines. Uninfected intestines don’t develop the same cell layers found in normal intestines. On top of that, the blood supply between the gut and the rest of the body doesn’t form properly in these mice.” This is only the tip of what he goes into detail of how important our parasites are to our overall health. An interesting read!

Good questions. I believe that bacterial genes contain certain conserved sequences that allow them to be identified as bacterial - such as specific DNA sequences at the 16S ribosomal subunit site.

However, I am not entirely familiar with exactly how these advanced technologies separate human and bacterial genes. Happily next week I will be attending a training session at the J. Craig Venter Institute (his team sequenced the human genome and is now working on bacterial genes) where I will learn how to use several of the latest sequencing tools I’m excited!

When I get back I feel I’ll be able to answer your question in much greater detail. So I’ll add more to my response then.

Best,

Amy