community – BioQuakes

“Get more exercise. Eat right. Make new friends.”

A new study reveals that community gardening helps lower stress and anxiety, and reduces cancer risks. Researchers have found that those who gardened had elevated fiber intake and increased physical activity.

A study conducted by Jill Litt, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder, funded by the American Cancer Society, was the first-ever, controlled trial of community gardening found that those who started gardening ate more fiber and got more physical activity — two known ways to reduce risk of cancer and chronic diseases. They also saw their levels of stress and anxiety significantly decrease.

During this study, in the spring, Litt recruited 291 non-gardening adults and assigned half of them to the community gardening group and the other half to a control group. The adults in the control group were asked to wait one year to start gardening.

By fall, the adults in the gardening group were eating on average 1.4 grams more fiber per day than the control group. The gardening group’s fiber intake increased around 7%.

Fiber exerts a profound effect on inflammatory and immune responses, influencing everything from how we metabolize food to how healthy our gut microbiome is to how susceptible we are to diabetes and certain cancers. It also helps regulate the body’s use of sugars, helping to keep hunger and blood sugar in check.

The gardening group also increased their physical activity levels by about 42 minutes per week. The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week. Only a quarter of the U.S. population meet the exercise guidelines. With just two to three visits to the community garden weekly, participants met 28% of that requirement.

The participants in this study also saw that their stress and anxiety levels decrease. Those who came into the study most stressed and anxious saw the greatest reduction in mental health issues.

This article relates to AP biology because as we learned in the blood glucose regulation simulation, exercise and eating well helps regulate blood glucose levels. Fiber also plays an important role in regulating blood glucose levels. It is important to keep your blood sugar levels in range to help prevent or delay long-term health problems. Staying in your target range can also help improve your energy and mood. This is also an example of a negative feedback loop.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

A common public misconception is that bacteria live alone and act as solitary organisms. This misconception, however, is far from reality.

Bacteria always live in very dense communities. Most bacteria prefer to live in a biofilm, a name for a group of organisms that stick together on a surface in an aqueous environment. The cells that stick together form an extracellular matrix which provides structural and biochemical support to the surrounding cells. In these biofilms, bacteria increase efficiency by dividing labor. The exterior cells in the biofilm defend the group from threats while the interior cells produce food for the rest.

While it has long been known that bacteria can communicate through the group with chemical signals, also known as quorum sensing, new studies show that bacteria can also communicate with one another electrically. Ned Wingreen, a biophysicist at Princeton describes the significance of the discovery; “I think these are arguably the most important developments in microbiology in the last couple years, We’re learning about an entirely new mode of communication.”

An entirely new mode of communication it is! Heres how it works:

Ion channels in a bacteria cell’s outer membrane allow electrically charged molecules to pass in and out, just like a neuron or nerve cell. Neurons pump out Sodium ions and let in Potassium ions until the threshold is reached and depolarization occurs. This is known as an action potential. Gurol Suel, a biophysicist at UCSD emphasizes that while the bacteria’s electrical impulse is similar to a neuron’s, it is much slower, a few millimeters per hour compared to a neuron’s 100 meters per second.

Photo by Chris 73 Wikimedia Commons

So what does this research mean?

Scientists agree that this revelation could open new doors to discovery. Suel says that electrical signaling has been shown to be stronger than traditional chemical signaling. In his research, Suel found that potassium signals could travel at constant strength for 1000 times the width of a bacteria cell, much longer and stronger than any chemical signal. Electrical signaling could also mean more communication between different bacteria. Traditional chemical signaling relies on receptors to receive messages, while bacteria, plant cells, and animal neurons all use potassium to send and receive signals. If these findings are correct, there’s potential in the future for the development of new antibiotics.

Learning about electrical signaling in bacteria has complicated our understanding of these previously thought to be simple organisms. El Naggar, another biophysicist at USC says, “Now we’re thinking of [bacteria] as masters of manipulating electrons and ions in their environment. It’s a very, very far cry from the way we thought of them as very simplistic organisms.”

BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: community

Gardening May Help Reduce Cancer Risk and Boost Mental Health

Bacteria may be more complex than we think

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