Decoding the DNA of lung bacteria to keep you healthy

Looking at the DNA of bacteria that live in people's lungs is just one of the things you can learn about at the Heart and Lung Convenience Store.

Have you ever seen a picture of the earth taken from space? Zoom in and you see clouds, zoom in further, you see earth and sea, further still, and you see continents, cities, and finally people. If you stay focused on one of those people and zoom in again, you see a face, then skin, hairs, then cells. Don’t stop there, zoom in further and you will find the human body is covered in all sorts of different bacteria.

You have probably heard of bacteria before, you have probably been told they are bad and dirty, and cause all sorts of horrible diseases, well this is only part of the story. While there are bad bacteria out there, we now know there are hundreds of bacteria working together all over our bodies helping keep us healthy. Some bacteria are present in our nose and different ones are found in our digestive tracts, just like there are different animals in the sea and on land.  

Our research involves investigating all the different bacteria that live within our lungs (as well as other microorganisms). Because bacteria are so tiny, we do this by looking at DNA. DNA works like an instruction manual for cells telling them how to, grow, develop and function. By looking at the DNA code we are able to find out what kind of microorganisms make up the group of bacteria living within the lung. We can then see if this collection of bacteria is different in a healthy person compared to someone with a disease like asthma or cystic fibrosis.  

So how do we do this? Some of our researchers will be down at the Heart and Lung convenience store to show you, but if you can’t make it down, here is a quick idea of what we do; First we need a sample of the bacteria, we can get this from a swab (like a very clean cotton bud), a lung brush (a very, very tiny bottle brush for your lungs) or sputum (that green stuff you cough up when you are sick, yuck). We take that sample and we bash it up to break all the cells open and use chemicals to get rid of everything that is not DNA. Once we have done this, we can use a DNA sequencing machine to tell us the signature of a specific section of the DNA, like a leaf allows us to know what kind of tree it is, this DNA sequence allows us to know what kind of bacteria we have found.

Did you know that lung diseases are one of the biggest killers in the world?  I’m sure everyone knows someone with asthma, you may even know someone with cystic fibrosis, what about someone who smokes? Well believe it or not all these things effect what bacteria are in your lungs. We find hundreds of different bacteria within lungs and the types of bacteria we find changes depending on how healthy your lungs are. In the future we hope to be able to use this information to help you keep your lungs in top condition.