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Molecule produced by gut bacteria causes atherosclerosis
The discovery, made thanks to an experiment involving hundreds of bank employees in Spain, opens the door to new treatments beyond reducing cholesterol
A team of Spanish scientists made a striking announcement 15 years ago: they were seeking thousands of volunteers among the employees of Banco Santander in Madrid: researchers wanted to study them in depth for decades, in order to understand the onset of cardiovascular disease in healthy people. Sancho and his colleagues acknowledge that further research will be needed to identify the specific strains of bacteria capable of producing the molecule, but they point to “changes in intestinal microbial ecology” following dietary modifications, with an increase in bacterial genera such as Escherichia, Shigella, and Eubacterium. The biotechnologist Cayetano Pleguezuelos and his colleagues at the Hubrecht Institute (The Netherlands) demonstrated in February 2020 that a strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli produces a toxic molecule, called colibactin, which damages the DNA of human cells and causes malignant tumors.
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