Most Nutritional Therapists look to comprehensive digestive stool analysis as an integral part of their clinical work up in patients with symptoms that indicate gastro-intestinal dysfunction.
These have been in use for some years, and I thought it might be interesting to look ahead and see what type of investigation tests we may all be using in 2020.
The test that caught my eye, in part because of its colourful appearance, and in part because of the manipulation of the bacteria that share our moist spaces has been developed from a collaboration of designers and scientists from Cambridge University. They genetically engineered bacteria to secrete a variety of coloured pigments, visible to the naked eye. They did this by designing standardised sequences of DNA, known as BioBricks , and inserting them into E. coli bacteria. Each BioBrick part contains genes selected from existing organisms spanning the living kingdoms, enabling the bacteria to produce a colour: red, yellow, green, blue, brown or violet.
One of the possibilities they came up with was The Scatalog, which proposes to use pigment producing bacteria for inexpensive personal disease monitoring.
The idea is pretty simple: eat some tasty yogurt containing E. coli bacteria engineered to secrete different coloured pigments in the presence of specific chemical signals. E. coli are a normal part of human intestinal flora, so the bioengineered bacteria should be able to colonise your gastrointestinal tract. In a healthy system, only one colour – say blue – would be produced, resulting in blue poo. Any chemical changes in your system, such as exposure to toxins or development of a disease, would cause your stool to change colour. Just match your stool colour to the reference turds in the Scatalog and you get an instant health assessment.
Whilst a long way off in terms of likelihood of being utilised in human analysis, I feel that these designers and scientists have opened up a diagnostic opportunity, that should bacterial manipulation be determined to present no risk to the ecology in the human gut, will offer a simple mechanism of risk analysis – albeit that some more health sensitive individuals may end up driving practitioners mad with daily photos!
