Author: Faith Rudebusch / Source: Science News for Students
Sometimes, a bully’s teasing is enough to make your stomach hurt. But a new study finds that bullying might change more than how a gut feels. It could alter which microbes live there — at least in hamsters.
Katherine Partrick is a graduate student at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Working at its Neuroscience Institute, she studies gut microbes. And she knew that studies have shown that social stress, such as bullying, can cause long-term health problems. Those problems often affect someone’s stomach or intestines.
She also knew that as in other mammals, the guts of people teem with microbes. More than 100 trillion bacteria, fungi and other microbes live as squatters in your gut. It might sound gross, but your body needs many of these microbes to stay healthy. Some help digest food or make vitamins. Others, though, may make you sick.
Gut microbes “can actually communicate with our brain and affect our health,” she notes. So she hypothesized that social stress might change which microbes would choose to colonize the digestive tract.
Studying this in people can be challenging. So Partrick and her team instead used Syrian hamsters. Yes, that’s the same animal many people keep as pets. But certain aspects of this rodent’s biology — and responses to stress — are enough like a human’s for it to “model” what might happen in people. Such animal models can help researchers answer questions about people without experimenting on them.
Syrian hamsters seemed well suited for this study because the males can get quite aggressive towards each other. When they meet, they tend to wrestle. The hamsters don’t seriously hurt each other. But the encounters have consequences. The winner gets to be the boss and can bully the other. Partrick thought that stress might change the bullied animal’s microbiome (My-kro-BY-oam), which is the sum of all the microbes living in its guts.
To test that, her group needed hamster feces. The reason: Roughly half of all cells in the fresh poop collected from the animals’ cages come from microbes in the rodents’ guts.
Next, the scientists analyzed the DNA in those cells. That would tell them what species the DNA came from.
Now the researchers introduced two males, putting one in the other’s cage. This created “a bullying situation,” Partrick explains. The animals “kind of rolled around, kind of tussled around with each other,” she notes. After wrestling, the loser — or “subordinate” hamster — ran around nervously. The winner chased him, so Partrick could easily…
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