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angrystego@lemmy.world 3 days agoThe biomes are what it says - not one species, not a few of them, whole fucking biomes! There are thousands and thousands species, bacterial worlds inside of us, and the species interact in complicated ways. It’s not just the presence or absence of a species that is beneficial, it’s often a question of combination of species that makes a huge difference. As was said, we’re just beginning to understand. But I’d bet any treatment that makes the system simple will have some serious downsides that will appear later, when we know better.
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Yeah there would be serious dangers to creating a synthetic biome, but theoretically it should be possible to vastly improve through actual engineering instead of natural selection. And it should be easier than doing any genetic engineering on a human genome, because you could create a more simple model for a single celled biome with specific input and output chemicals. I imagine LLMs could help with creating the map of inputs and outputs, then generate candidates to refine. But I understand we still don’t even have a scientific model for a single cell.
Like produce everything a human needs just from sugars, fats and some minerals. That’s not the way to do it but in an extreme case you could. Maybe we could even engineer to digest cellulose.
Of course you’d want a quick and easy killswitch and be able to replace a synthetic gut biome it with a natural gut biome again. And you’d want some kind of “predator species” that kills any foreign bacteria, like in any biome.