Embracing the gut microbiota: the new frontier for inflammatory and infectious diseases

Abstract

The gut microbiota provides essential signals for the development and appropriate function of the immune system. Through this critical contribution to immune fitness, the gut microbiota has a key role in health and disease. Recent advances in the technological applications to study microbial communities and their functions have contributed to a rapid increase in host–microbiota research. Although it still remains difficult to define a so-called ‘normal' or ‘healthy' microbial composition, alterations in the gut microbiota have been shown to influence the susceptibility of the host to different diseases. Current translational research combined with recent technological and computational advances have enabled in-depth study of the link between microbial composition and immune function, addressing the interplay between the gut microbiota and immune responses. As such, beneficial modulation of the gut microbiota is a promising clinical target for many prevalent diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic abnormalities such as obesity, reduced insulin sensitivity and low-grade inflammation, allergy and protective immunity against infections.

Distinct roles for dietary lipids and Porphyromonas gingivalis infection on atherosclerosis progression and the gut microbiota

“…Recent evidence in humans supports an etiological role for the intestinal microbiota in inflammatory atherosclerosis [18, 19]. The gastrointestinal tract is the largest reservoir of microbes in humans and is comprised of predominantly commensal bacteria [20, 21].…”

Gut microbes as future therapeutics in treating inflammatory and infectious diseases: Lessons from recent findings

“…Although the lifestyle and genetic factors are also considered as the influential determinants of obesity, recent research exploring physiological significance on the gut microbiota suggested it to be a key environmental factor that influences the metabolic syndrome [128,129]. Another striking feature of the gut microbiota is the heritability that links abundance of the specific gut microbial taxa to the host genetics [130] and amongst the heritable taxa, Firmicutes phylum is associated with leanness [47]. Composition of the gut microbiota is influenced by host genetics and can impact host metabolism [131].…”

“…Reduced gut microbial diversity has been reported to increase the risk of allergy in school children and in most of the cases, it is food allergy [142]. A recent study has shown that depletion of bacteria like Bifidobacterium, Akkermansia, and Faecalibacterium, along with an abundance of fungi such as Candida and Rhodotorula in neonates, may predispose to allergic susceptibility by influencing T-cell differentiation [47]. Furthermore, a study by the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) identified a transient alteration in the gut microbiota associated with the reduced abundance of bacteria belonging to Lachnospira, Veillonella, Faecalibacterium and Rothia genera during the first 100 days of life in the infants found to increase the risk of asthma [46].…”

“…The protective functions of the gut microbiota often damaged due to the perturbation by any of the aforementioned factors or by other external factors lead to one or several pathogenic transformations in the host body that result in several life-threatening diseases [40][41][42]. Dysbiosis, i.e., breakdown of microbial communities, has been implicated as a cause for several acute and chronic problems such as inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, metabolic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, allergic diseases, neuro-developmental illness and life-threatening infectious diseases ranging from microbial infections to multicellular parasitic infections [43][44][45][46][47]. The reestablishment of a healthy microbiota in the gut (eubiosis) by supplementing with the preand probiotics is now considered as an effective choice to treat several disorders resulting from the damage of the gut microbiota [48,49].…”

Gut Microbiota: What We Could Do, Not Just Use ‘Young Healthy Poo’ for Drugs?

“…If patients occasionally have taken overdose antibiotics, doctors just give them faeces from whom they live with to help rebuilt their gut microbiomes. As the technologies developed, we know gut microbiomes have changed if being obesity [1], being sick [2] or being ageing [3], so researchers tried to make faeces 'drugs' from thin, healthy and young individuals [4]. It's prospective and shows great benefits if this idea works in the near future, however, in this review, we' d like to discuss some other essential questions in this area.…”