Will map unknown archaea in our guts

Most people know that we have hundreds of different types of bacteria in our guts, but fewer people know that they are also home to archaea. Wallenberg Academy Fellow André Mateus will investigate previously unknown gut archaea to better understand how they function and what role they play in our well-being. 

Archaea used to be called archaebacteria. Researchers believed they were a subset of bacteria but when they started to study archaea more closely, they realized that they are not particularly like bacteria. Archaea were therefore given their own kingdom, or domain as it is now known in biology. 

Archaea are extremely resilient and live everywhere, even in our gut. Naturally, researchers are curious about what they do in our insides, but uncovering this has been difficult because many conventional mapping methods in molecular biology do not work on archaea. 

However, to create an image of what our gut archaea do, Dr André Mateus from Umeå University will use a new and innovative method known as systems biology. Using pharmaceuticals, for example, he will block the function of different proteins in the archaea and then examine the effect this has on the archaea’s metabolism. This approach is like blocking a city street to see the effect it has on traffic flows. Which streets become jammed? And which streets are not affected at all? The aim is to understand the archaea’s molecular networks and how they can affect our health. 

Photo Patrik Lundin