每日一翻：Fecal Transplanters Fish Out Key Ingredient

These days, antibiotics are no silver bullet. In fact, if you get them in the hospital, you may end up with an additional infection. Like the bug Clostridium difficile, or C. diff — which infects more than 300,000 Americans a year and kills some 14,000. C. diff flourishes in the post-antibiotic, microbe-free landscape of your gut. But there is a way to stop it — a fecal transplant. That cocktail of microbes from a healthy person’s gut can rein in a C. diff outbreak. The question is not eewww? It’s: what are the transplant’s active ingredients?

目前，抗生素已不是灵丹妙药。事实上，如果在医院注射了抗生素之后，你或许会得到一些副作用。就像艰难梭状芽胞杆菌，或者叫艰难梭菌，每年被这种细菌感染的美国人有30多万，其中大约14000人走向死亡。艰难梭菌大量存在于使用过的抗生素中或者是显微镜看不到的肠道中。但是有办法可以阻止它——粪便移植。这种从健康人肠道内得到的细菌混合物可以控制艰难梭菌的疫情。问题不是@#￥？而是什么才是有效成份？

Well, one of them appears to be a bacterium called Clostridium scindens. Because in past studies, people and mice that harbored C. scindens were protected against a full-blown C. diff infection. So researchers dosed mice with the good guy, C. scindens, after a bout of antibiotics. And the treatment did indeed ward off C. diff, compared to a cocktail of other microbes, or nothing at all.

C. scindens makes a living by breaking down bile, the researchers say, and it’s those secondary products that seem to inhibit C. diff. The findings are in the journal Nature. [Charlie G. Buffie et al.: Precision microbiome reconstitution restores bile acid mediated resistance to Clostridium difficile]

研究者们说，C. scindens通过分解胆汁而存活，而它的分泌物似乎可以抑制艰难梭菌。这个研究发表在《自然》杂志上。

This work could lead to more targeted probiotic treatments. But study author Eric Pamer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says it’s worth remembering that when it comes to microbes, the sum is often greater than its parts. “In some ways I would say this is far more complex than an orchestra, in that there are many more interdependencies, and many of which we just don’t understand yet, but that are starting to be illuminated by ongoing work.” Now, at least, we know one of the featured performers.

这项研究可以带来更多的有针对性的益生菌治疗。但是报告的作者、斯隆凯特林癌症中心的Eric Pamer说，值得铭记的是当谈到细菌的时候，总体往往比部分之和发挥的作用更强大。“我认为，从某种意义上说，这个比管弦乐队更加复杂，因为这里有更多的相关依赖性，并且其中很多东西我们还不明白，但是从正在进行的工作中我们开始受到很多启发。”现在，至少我们知道了一种重要的成份。

— Christopher Intagliata