Mind control... the natural way...

'Zombie walk 2010'
by rodolpho.reis
under a CC license

A few weeks ago, the story of the 'ability' of some humble members of the lactobacillus genus to alter the behaviour of mice made headlines in many online media and gained several minutes of publicity on the TV.

The story was based on a paper of Cryan et al. in PNAS, which describes the effect on the behaviour of mice when fed with feed supplemented with Lactobacillus rhamnosus; altogether, mice became more relaxed. Although that's not the first time that gut bacteria have been shown to have an effect on the mood of mice in vivo, this time the impact to the public seems to be higher.

Symbiotic relationships in living organisms is nothing too uncommon. That applies to both mutualistic and parasitic symbiosis. Although 'mind control' cases have been known, especially in parasitic symbiosis, it wouldn't have been easy for me to imagine that the same would apply to a mutualistic symbiosis, especially if that was taking place in the gut.

The 'mind control' cases one would imagine that they should involve an organism with direct access to the brain or, at least, to the bloodstream. The infection of the bullet ants from cordyceps is an example. The fungus forces the infected ant to climb upwards and firmly grab itself. There, the ant will eventually die and the ascocarp (the fruiting body of the fungus) will come out of the ant's head.



'Mind control' can be used by insects which want to lay their eggs on their ideal host, too. For the orb spider, for instance, the nemesis is the pompilid wasp, which temporarily immobilises the spider, lays an egg on it and let the larva do the rest. The larva sucks nutrients from the spider and, when the time comes, chemically instructs the spider to alter its web in such a way that it can support the cocoon that the larva will later on make for itself. Needless to say that the orb spider doesn't survive the process and becomes dinner, after all. (the video below shows the process - the action starts from about 03:00)



An even spookier approach is practiced by the Ampulex compressa wasp. That uses cockroaches to lay its eggs onto. To manipulate the cockroach, the wasp injects, in series, firstly a temporary numbing agent in the cockroach's brain and, then, a chemical that blocks its escape reflex. After the process, the cockroach is alive and well (not for too long though) and follows the wasp's will. The end is bitter in this case, too, as the larvae will consume the cockroach in the process, starting from its non-vital organs.

Snails, too, can host parasites. (I found a link to the video below at http://primesurrealestate.com/2010/04/mind-altering-parasites/).



For humans, the list of parasites is not too short, either. But I am not aware of any zombie-like mind control bugs. Yes, toxoplasma gondii can alter the behaviour and behavioural characteristics of people, affecting males and females in different ways but not in the grotesque way that bullet ants are controlled by the fungus. Still though, the effect from toxoplasma might be responsible for the macroscopic properties of societies around the world, taking into consideration how widespread toxoplasmosis is, although other factors are likely to exercise far higher influence (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635495/).

A number of diseases are also known to affect the mental processes, usually messing with the brain tissue (e.g., Alzheimer's, syphilis, etc.) but such changes - I suppose - are non-reversible.

Going back to the story with the mice and lactobacillus rahmnosus, the beauty in it is that the effect is 'subtle'. Measurable and real but mild and reversible. And that shows a lot of potential to be explored on the use of probiotics not only for the protection of the gut's normal function but also for the delivery of 'brain-related' interventions. What makes things even more interesting is that living bacteria are adaptable and 'intelligent' in the sense that they may be able to perform their 'mind-controlling action' (e.g., excreting a cocktail of chemicals) only under the right conditions. Just imagine mitigating the stress feeling by adopting a diet rich in probiotics - e.g., within fermented food - with the ability to respond to in-gut stress markers. It is so much easier than having to take pills and the fact that their action is subtle may allow individuals to also train themselves to feel less stressed.

It seems, after all, that diet does have the potential for an even greater impact on our lives...

The knowledge in the closet

14/01 was a big day for the agro-, food- and bio- people around the world going after European research grants (it was the deadline for the 2010 KBBE call of FP7 - a public research funding instrument in Europe, giving about 53 billion euros to research in the period from 2007 to 2013).

The persistently pending question, however, is: what happens to the results of all that research? Understandably, not all research efforts are successful; and even when they are successful, they don't necessarily lead to tangible results. There 's really nothing wrong with that; research is a venture into the unknown (well, actually it is a venture in the not fully known, but let's not stick onto that for the time being), thus has associated risks, mostly of financial nature. It is also understandable that some of the research carried out will end up calling for further research in order to reach a ready-to-exploit stage.

But what is the amount of that ready-to-exploit scientific knowledge? The last few years (or decades) the need from knowledge exploitation has become a policy priority. I can't judge if that has led to substantial results (I have no means to measure in an objective way) but at least I feel that a higher number of people in universities and companies are rather aware that there are ways to protect, trade and - in general - exploit new knowledge.

The current system for intellectual property protection has been widely promoted as a helpful tool for the quest of knowledge utilisation. While I can see the pluses, I can't help but wonder what could other players do, that have limited access to the resources needed for such a game. And what about knowledge that is already available in an "unprotected" form, that is, either published or unpublished - being kept in a closet full of paper, data CDs and other archiving means.

Surely, even more of that knowledge could be exploited; if not at a big scale, at least at a micro-scale, through a cooperation of scientists will small companies under short-term projects of low, affordable budget; something like the sales that shops have, only for science :-)

As an example, think about the valorisation of the waste from the fish processing factories. The large production plants often produce fishmeal or fish oil out of that, using available equipment suitable for their volumes of production. At low production volumes, however, although the principles remain the same, it is likely that no optimised processes are commercially available, which would be a relatively easy task for an engineer to design. Interestingly, the original research on that must have worked on laboratory-scale volumes and, thus, is likely to be closer to the desired application.

The same applies for most of the waste outputs of farming, where biotechnology could provide solutions, sometimes with no further research being necessary. One could argue that the driving force of additional income from such as effort is simply non-existent in those cases; the value of the products derived from those exploitation processes is only achievable if one has a distribution and sales network reaching the right market. And then, there is the risk of producing surpluses of secondary products, thus leading to a drop of their market value. True and true. The right answer depends on the actual case but, in general, it takes an "unbalanced" action to break a vicious circle.

Cooperation frameworks around that idea have been tried in a number of countries with encouraging results (e.g. the innovation vouchers scheme that has been tried in many places, including Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Greece, etc.). However, with big grants around asking for ambitious research, the priorities of most researchers are not shaped towards "low-tech" cooperation with small enterprises. While I admit it would be stupid to suggest throttling the funding for innovative research, I believe that a stronger mandate for exploitation through small companies should begin to form.

Yes, there will be implementation problems (e.g., how many small food companies would put innovation as a priority instead of growing production volumes or sales figures? how many of those companies would be willing to participate in such schemes?). And yes, the existing legal framework may not be very flexible around food innovation (e.g., putting a health-related claim on a foodstuff is not a trivial process - and that has a pretty good reason behind that - I might add). But the potential benefits are many-fold:

• "Older" knowledge or published knowledge could find application in a way that could further benefit the original researcher or research group
• "Older" knowledge or published knowledge could be transformed to practical innovation at a higher pace than entirely new, breakthrough knowledge
  
• Small companies will get exposed to working together with scientists and vice-versa; possibly a beneficial exercise for both groups
• The public profile of food research will improve
• The mobilisation of private funds for research could be encouraged (many small sums of money instead of a few larger ones)
• The competition between food producers would benefit - even at the regional level

It might be worth considering it in a more thorough way, especially now that the global financial crisis has reminded to us that "big" doesn't necessarily mean "stable".

(Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiccked/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)