Russian scientists have identified a type of bacteria whose concentration in the bodies of patients with clinical depression is lower than in healthy individuals. The discovery was made by specialists from the Skoltech University of Technology, along with colleagues from the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the N. A. Alekseev Psychiatric Clinical Hospital No. 1, and the V. P. Serbsky Center for Psychiatry and Addiction.
The microbes, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, turned out to be true "joy bacteria," which live in the human colon and are not found in the digestive systems of animals. The results were obtained through metagenome analysis—the collection of genes in intestinal bacteria.
"If you know which genes in the metagenome of the gut microbiota of patients with depression are significantly more or less represented than in healthy individuals, you can try to do two things. First, you can use stool analysis as an auxiliary tool in the diagnosis of mental illness. "Secondly, you can create drugs that normalize the microflora of patients with depression," said Alexey Kovtun, a research intern at the Skoltech Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology and the first author of the scientific paper describing the work.
Alphalab's entire line of Colonoflor test systems includes research on this joyful bacterium, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii.
