Unraveling the Mysteries of Mischievous Microbiome

Science explains why some people smell worse than others despite keeping themselves squeaky clean.


  
The body is crawling with microbes that have evolved with the person, depending on the innate metabolism, history of infections, microbiome swaps, diet and lifestyle. The body's ecosystem of microorganisms can increase the risk for dangerous diseases for which we have unreserved levels of sympathy. It can also lead to ​unlikable conditions such as unpredictable and embarrassing outbursts of odor emitting through the pores - odor so bad it ruins social lives and careers.

Let those who never smelled bad cast the first stone

Analysis of our metabolism is crucial to comprehending the responses of our genes and microbes to the stresses of daily life, and to elucidating the causes and consequences of health and disease.

We applied metabolomic approach to an elusive condition that has always evaded diagnosis: socially and psychologically distressing odors that occur without a known or apparent cause. Learn about our preliminary results and participate in our anonymous survey to help us better understand and help with this condition.

My hope: TMAU short

 

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

VIDEO "My hope: Tmau short"

My hope: Tmau short

by TheoMeta

W.K. Elohim Productions

March 30, 2017

One of our community members found this TMAU short film and shared it with me. For the first time ever, it was actually optimistic and full of hope.

I do believe we have come a long way, as we continue steadfastly on the path looking for answers that we hope will arrive sooner than later. There is currently more hope now because there are many "fronts" from which we are expecting new discoveries, and that is most promising, uplifting and inspiring.

Thank you TheoMeta for doing this film and for allowing me to post it in the MEBO Blog! Sharing the hope saves lives. We must keep sharing.

María

Metabolic Pathway Simulation: Apocrine Bromhidrosis compared to TMAU

Metabolic Pathway Simulation: Apocrine Bromhidrosis compared to TMAU

METABOLIC PATHWAY SIMULATIONS

APOCRINE BROMHIDROSIS

COMPARED TO TRIMETHYLAMINURIA

Danny.kunz@gmx.de

Click for presentation

Danny Kunz has donated a very interesting PowerPoint presentation for the MEBO Conference 2017 consisting of metabolic pathway simulations on Apocrine Bromhidrosis compared to Trimethylaminuria. This presentation also discusses the role of the eccrine glands in bromhidrosis.

We are most grateful to Danny, who is a part of this, "loosely coupled group of patients (and non-patients) with academic degree and without academic degree integrating our separate research capabilities and representing an addressable unit."

This theory is supported by high throughput simulations backed by large enzyme databases, which makes it a very persuasive presentation. In other words, this group has done a computer simulation of bromhidrosis backed up by large enzyme databases, as Danny explains in the presentation. Their theory is that bromhidrosis is an apocrine and eccrine sweat glands metabolic disease.  Danny also says in his presentation that thyroid function with and without elevated hormone, TSH, may plays a role in bromhidrosis, and the group recommends supplementation and diet for this.

Even though the simulations discussed in this PowerPoint presentation do not have the aspect of medical proof yet, it provides a very compelling theory that calls for further research.

TOPIC OF THE PRESENTATION:

1.      Fecal (indole) breath and body odor and it's recommended supplementation and diet, 

2.      Apocrine and eccrine sweat glands metabolic disease in bromhidrosis,

a.      Discussions on isovaleric acid and amino acid leucine in eccrine bromhidrosis,

b.      Recommends a Thyroid functions blood test, with and without elevated Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), and recommended supplementation and diet.

This very interesting presentation raises question on whether TMAU2 to TMAU1 relation pattern could be transferred to the Bromhidrosis pattern as well.

Click for larger copy

We are most grateful to Danny Kunz and his colleagues for creating this very interesting presentation for our MEBO Annual Conference and Meetup 2017!

María

María de la Torre
Founder and Executive Director

A Public Charity
maria.delatorre@meboresearch.com
www.meboresearch.org
www.mebo.com.br/
MEBO's Blog (English)
El Blog de MEBO (español)
MEBO Brasil - Blog (Portuguese)

Post settings Labels No matching suggestions Published on 4/11/17 7:02 PM Permalink Location Options Post publishedPost: Edit

Giving the underserved the care they deserve

Nobody likes strong smells coming from other human beings. It's just that social convention: you are nice, if you smell nice, and you are a monster - like Shakespeare's Caliban - if you smell bad.

But it could be the brunt of the genetic or environmental misfortune

Seeing Through the Skin

by AURAMETRIX

​Human skin emits light (albeit the glow is extremely weak) and a wide variety of small molecules that may be sometimes "sniffed" by dogs or even other humans. These chemicals tell a story about our health and wellness, things we eat and drink, touch and breathe. Mosquitoes use such emissions to assess our "attractiveness" from indicators such as Indoles (unpleasantly smelling but healthy "inner soil" biomarker) or carbon dioxide (amount of which correlates with the size of the person producing it) in the air.  Sampling air for health indicators is much less invasive than drawing blood and could be an invaluable diagnostic tool. Many applications of gas sensors have been proposed over decades ranging from sweat patches to sensorized garments. Where are we now? What is the 2016 state of the art? Last month, BACtrack won 1st Prize in “Wearable Alcohol Sensor Challenge” Issued by National Institutes of Health. Milo Sensors, employing a different approach to identify ethanol molecules diffusing through the skin, won 2nd prize. BACtrack Skyn will be available in limited quantities later this year, marking an important step from bulky alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelets remotely monitoring offenders to inconspicuous devices. Perhaps, one day, drug patches, too, won't require sending them to a lab for analysis. Human skin is a super-highway of many small molecules reflecting our health and wellbeing. Various devices capable of "seeing" through our skin were announced in the past several years. Some of them - like AIRO watch claiming to detect metabolites in your bloodstream as they are released during and after meals - turned out to be vaporware. The jury is still out on many others like HealbeGobe. And the remaining ones are still in prototyping stages.  EU-funded Biotex textiles and Perspiration Detective patch development at the University of Cincinnati started from detecting sodium ions in sweat as indicators of hydration levels. A tattoo-like electronic sweat sensor built by a team in UCSD demonstrated that measuring a change in lactate might be sufficient to find when an athlete is about to “hit the wall.” Startup Electrozyme, later renamed to Biolinq, was formed to commercialize this technology. The picture shows their prototype of a skin-applied electrochemical sensor that analyses body fluids to provide actionable health information. The goal is to develop temporary tattoo biosensors providing blood level info without accessing blood. Halo Wearables will launch their non-invasive hydration monitoring wearable in early 2016. It is tailored specifically for elite athletes.  Halo's optical sensors track sodium and potassium levels in the user's blood. ​ Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have also developed a wearable sensor that can monitor sodium, potassium and lactate levels in sweat. A paper with their findings was published in Nature earlier this year. ​ Startup Xsensio, accepted this year in Mass Challenge accelerator, works on “intelligent stamps” the size of a credit card (Lab-on-Skin wearables) including a unique low-power sensor for sweat analysis. ECHO smart patch from Kenzen aims to "silently follow your health and notify you only when it's most important". It analyzes sodium and potassium in sweat to monitor hydration, lactic acid and glucose analysis energy expenditure.  Existing technologies can detect a general increase or decrease in metabolites rather exact concentrations. So using sweat to accurately monitor clinically important variables such as glucose levels, is still out of reach. But developers are employing innovative approaches to make it possible. A team from Seoul National University, University of Texas and a Massachusetts-based company MC10 are developing a flexible patch that senses glucose in people with diabetes and administers drugs, all in a single device. And there may be easier ways to display all the information collected from various sensors -  perhaps even directly on the body - as the team from the University of Tokyo demonstrated with device measuring oxygen saturation levels in blood. ​We've come a long way from bulky and invasive medical equipment that required the patient to remain in the hospital for monitoring. We have made a lot of progress from the times when all symptoms and signs were recorded with a pencil and paper. There is still a lot more to do before real-time self-managing noninvasive diagnostics reaches a breakthrough, but we are so much closer.

REFERENCES


Andreoni G, Standoli CE, & Perego P (2016). Defining Requirements and Related Methods for Designing Sensorized Garments. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 16 (6) PMID: 27240361

Gao W, Emaminejad S, Nyein HY, Challa S, Chen K, Peck A, Fahad HM, Ota H, Shiraki H, Kiriya D, Lien DH, Brooks GA, Davis RW, & Javey A (2016). Fully integrated wearable sensor arrays for multiplexed in situ perspiration analysis. Nature, 529 (7587), 509-14 PMID: 26819044

Imani S, Bandodkar AJ, Mohan AM, Kumar R, Yu S, Wang J, & Mercier PP (2016). A wearable chemical-electrophysiological hybrid biosensing system for real-time health and fitness monitoring. Nature communications, 7 PMID: 27212140

Lee H, Choi TK, Lee YB, Cho HR, Ghaffari R, Wang L, Choi HJ, Chung TD, Lu N, Hyeon T, Choi SH, & Kim DH (2016). A graphene-based electrochemical device with thermoresponsive microneedles for diabetes monitoring and therapy. Nature nanotechnology, 11 (6), 566-72 PMID: 26999482

Panneer Selvam A, Muthukumar S, Kamakoti V, & Prasad S (2016). A wearable biochemical sensor for monitoring alcohol consumption lifestyle through Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) detection in human sweat. Scientific reports, 6 PMID: 26996103
XXX

Yokota T, Zalar P, Kaltenbrunner M, Jinno H, Matsuhisa N, Kitanosako H, Tachibana Y, Yukita W, Koizumi M, & Someya T (2016). Ultraflexible organic photonic skin. Science advances, 2 (4) PMID: 27152354

The Smell of Stress and Fear

Can we recognize if people around us are stressed, anxious or fearful without observing their facial expressions, body language and actions or hearing their voice and messages? Can we understand if we are stressed ourselves without assessing our heart rate, blood pressure, noticing dry throat, sweating, drops or surges in energy? Yes, we can - by using our nose - as humans, too, recognize and transmit their emotions through chemical senses.

When we are stressed or panic we become more sensitive to odors (Buróna et al., 2015), ranking neutral odors as unpleasant (Krusemark et al, 2013). Chronic stress will actually dull the senses (Yuan & Slotnick, 2013), but that's another story.

When other people are stressed, we can feel it without seeing or hearing them. Numerous experiments showed that we can recognize emotions from sweat alone. We might not be able to tell why, but experience sympathy by smelling odors of those taking exams vs just exercising on a bike (Prehn-Kristensen et al 2009), become more cooperative when smelling hard work, more submissive when detecting that other people's health status prioritizes their needs, more fearful when detecting chemical clues coming from people watching horror movies (Zhou and Chen, 2009, de Groot et al., 2012) and exhibit risk taking behavior when detecting other people's anxieties (Haegler et al, 2010).

What is the exact chemistry of stress, anxiety and fear? We are getting close to deciphering it. Stress, for example, might be recognized by six biomarkers, including indole and 2-methyl-pentadecane (Turner et al, 2013) that are also indicators of COPD (Martinez-Lozano Sinues et al, 2014) and heart disease. 

Correlating chemicals to health and wellness conditions is not easy. Acetone in breath, for example, has attracted the interest of clinical researchers for more than 60 years. Several dozen independent studies using various techniques and methods showed that much more complex analysis is required with long-term measurements of various health and environmental indicators including diet, treatments and prior medical history (Dowlaty, Yoon, and Galassetti, 2013). Aurametrix provides an integrated platform for such analysis, but until we sift through all the data, if you are stressed out, just take a deep breath and relax. Inhale confidence, exhale doubt.

REFERENCES

Haegler, K., Zernecke, R., Kleemann, A., Albrecht, J., Pollatos, O., Brückmann, H., & Wiesmann, M. (2010). No fear no risk! Human risk behavior is affected by chemosensory anxiety signals Neuropsychologia, 48 (13), 3901-3908 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.09.019

Prehn-Kristensen A, Wiesner C, Bergmann TO, Wolff S, Jansen O, Mehdorn HM, Ferstl R, & Pause BM (2009). Induction of empathy by the smell of anxiety. PloS one, 4 (6) PMID: 19551135

Dowlaty N, Yoon A, & Galassetti P (2013). Monitoring states of altered carbohydrate metabolism via breath analysis: are times ripe for transition from potential to reality? Current opinion in clinical nutrition and metabolic care, 16 (4), 466-72 PMID: 23739629

de Groot JH, Smeets MA, Kaldewaij A, Duijndam MJ, & Semin GR (2012). Chemosignals communicate human emotions. Psychological science, 23 (11), 1417-24 PMID: 23019141

Krusemark EA, Novak L, Gitelman D, Li W. (2013) When the sense of smell meets emotion: Anxiety-state-dependent olfactory processing and neural circuitry adaptation. Journal of Neuroscience. 33(39):15324 –15332.

Martinez-Lozano Sinues P, Meier L, Berchtold C, Ivanov M, Sievi N, Camen G, Kohler M, Zenobi R Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. Respiration; International Review of Thoracic Diseases [2014, 87(4):301-310] PMID: 25545545

Yuan TF, Slotnick BM. Roles of olfactory system dysfunction in depression. (2014) Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 54:26-30. doi: 10.1016/j.pnpbp.2014.05.013.