Smells can arm your gut defenses.

PhysOrg gets funky with research that demonstrates how off-putting smells that can signal the presence of disease-causing critters can also tell your gut it’s time to beef up the body’s chemical defenses:

As with humans, nematodes’ guts are a common target of disease-causing bacteria. The nematode reacts by destroying iron-containing organelles called mitochondria, which produce a cell’s energy, to protect this critical element from iron-stealing bacteria.

The presence in C. elegans of this protective response to odors produced by microbes suggests that the intestinal cells of other organisms, including mammals, may also retain the ability to respond protectively to the smell of pathogens, said the study’s senior author, Andrew Dillin, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

“Is there actually a smell coming off of pathogens that we can pick up on and help us fight off an infection?” he said. “We’ve been trying to show this in mice. If we can actually figure out that humans smell a pathogen and subsequently protect themselves, you can envision down the road something like a pathogen-protecting perfume.”


You can read more of Dillin’s research here, in Science Advances.