Poop Connects Us All

Netflix says so

Latif Nasser is a science reporter recently featured on the Netflix series Connected, a show about the astonishing connections uniting everything around us. The second episode is about poop — and when poop goes mainstream, I get really excited and have to report.

This article is a major spoiler, so if you intend to watch Connected #2, stop reading here.

This odyssey of excrement starts in Minde, Portugal, in a cave where the oldest human poop was recovered. This 50 000 years-old coprolite tells a lot about the diet of our ancestors, and the richness of their microbiome. Prior to industrialization, our predecessors had a higher microbial diversity. Latif Nasser sums it up:

“We’re the weird ones. We’ve put so much new and processed stuff into our bodies that we’ve remade ourselves from the inside out!”

Now we’re living a sort of Poop Renaissance and scientists use feces as a lense through which to see the world. In the London Abbey Mills Sewage Pumping Station, scientists analyze sewage water to reveal the dirty secrets of Londonians — like a drug test for a whole city, in real time. The Thames contains antidepressants, antibiotics, painkillers, ecstasy and MDMA (mostly on Friday and Saturday night) as well as cocaine (over all the week). All we take into our bodies goes out somewhere, and impacts the rivers, lakes and oceans all over the world. We need to take responsibility. In Umea, Sweden, Gustav Hellstrom and Tomas Brodin study the impact of these residues of tranquillizers by looking at how the active molecule in Xanax and Valium affects fish in lakes. At concentration levels that have already been found in the oceans, instead of being sedating, the benzodiazepine made the fish more active and risk-taking, removing their fear of predators and refuge-seeking behavior, altogether affecting their ability to survive and reproduce. These exposed fish were systematically eaten first. This is just an example, but other molecules have shown other impacts, with birth control affecting frogs, ibuprofen shellfish, cocaine eels… The researchers note that these drugs are needed and the way forward shouldn’t necessarily be to reduce their use, but to improve the treatment of wastewater.

But now for the positive side of poop. In particular, of whales’ poop. Because whales get their nutrients from the depth of the sea and their manure floats towards the surface, it gets to feed critters living in the superficial waters. Whale’s “outpoop” serves an essential role in the marine ecosystem, like a pump bringing nutrients eaten from the depth of the sea and releasing the organic matter on the surface.

Your own fecal matter may also have actual superpowers. While the CDC and WHO highlight we are still losing the battle against superbugs — bacteria resistant to all antibiotics — poop is a secret weapon we can use against the bacteria that kill us. Greg Merril, the CEO of Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, explains how the company develops viruses (bacteriophages) isolated from hospitals wastewaters all over the world to target the superbugs.

“Viruses and bacteria have been locked in mortal combat for billions of years: it’s the biggest tiniest rivalry on Earth”

With about 10³¹ species of phages on Earth, a challenge is to identify the right one for a specific infective bacterium. On the other side, phage collection never becomes obsolete as the viruses keep evolving in parallel with bacteria.

Other companies like Adaptive Phage Therapeutics develop similar approaches in Europe, for example the French biotech Eligo Bioscience!

It is similar to the mechanism of action of probiotics, albeit probiotics are not as specific as phages, but in their coevolution with other types of bacteria, they have learned to stimulate their host’s immune system to their own benefit, and created their own weaponry against their competitors, molecular ammunition in constant upgrade, to make room in their ecosystem.

Latif Nasser concludes with a surprising example of fecal serendipity. When the astronauts left the moon back for Earth, their dumped a load (of 96 bags of human waste) to make the journey back lighter. 50 years later, NASA scientists are organizing to go back up there and have a peek at it, mainly to answer the question “did anything survive in there?”. They think that probably not, BUT bacteria can form spores and survive or be revived from places you wouldn’t expect. If bacteria from the astronauts’ gut microbiota survived for 50 years on the moon, it would mean that life is extremely tenacious, and could bring new data in favor of the panspermia theory — the theory that life could have been seeded om Earth from a space-hitchhiking bacterium.

Also, if bacteria (or phages) are still alive up there, it means we could be dispersing life in space — and we would need to be extra careful when visiting other planets, to avoid disturbing any life potentially preceding our arrival.

So, yes, poop connects us all — its life-taking poisons are dragged to the water, its life-giving nutrients brighten creatures on surface of the sea, its life-saving properties can change the global fight against superbugs, and its space resilience means life could comes from above, and we could bring life to other far-far away galaxies.

“The most disgusting part of ourselves might just be our most significant contribution to the universe”.