Gut Microbiota Resilience: Definition, Link to Health and Strategies for Intervention

Abstract

The gut microbiota is a new frontier in health and disease. Not only many diseases are associated with perturbed microbiota, but an increasing number of studies point to a cause-effect relationship. Defining a healthy microbiota is not possible at the current state of our knowledge mostly because of high interindividual variability. A resilient microbiota could be used as surrogate for healthy microbiota. In addition, the gut microbiota is an "organ" with frontline exposure to environmental changes and insults. During the lifetime of an individual, it is exposed to challenges such as unhealthy diet, medications and infections. Impaired ability to bounce back to the pre-challenge baseline may lead to dysbiosis. It is therefore legitimate to postulate that maintaining a resilient microbiota may be important for health. Here we review the concept of resilience, what is known about the characteristics of a resilient microbiota, and how to assess microbiota resilience experimentally using a model of high fat diet challenge in humans. Interventions to maintain microbiota resilience can be guided by the knowledge of what microbial species or functions are perturbed by challenges, and designed to replace diminished species with probiotics, when available, or boost them with prebiotics. Fibers with multiple structures and composition can also be used to increase microbiota diversity, a characteristic of the microbiota that may be associated with resilience. We finally discuss some open questions and knowledge gaps.

Recent Advances in Understanding the Influence of Zinc, Copper, and Manganese on the Gastrointestinal Environment of Pigs and Poultry

“…In addition, Zn deficient chicks had expanded Proteobacteria, Enterobacteriaceae , and Enterococcus . As Zn is an essential mineral for many bacteria, the lower diversity and expansion of specific taxonomic groups indicates that those bacteria that can successfully compete for limited Zn or survive under Zn-limiting conditions are supported, but a reduction in diversity and expansion of the identified taxonomic groups have been associated with poorer gut health [ 34 ]. In a recent study, a Zn amino acid complex added to a wheat–rye based diet (at 60 mg/kg Zn) of broiler chickens increased Zn digestibility and villus length:crypt depth ratio, reduced abundance of some genera within the Proteobacteria phylum and oxidative stress, and improved starter phase feed conversion ratio compared to an equivalent amount of dietary Zn from Zn sulphate [ 35 ].…”

Gut microbiota response to antibiotics is personalized and depends on baseline microbiota

“…A resistant community can be defined as one that resists perturbation, while a resilient community is one that recovers after perturbation [ 6 ]. A resilient community will likely stabilize into a fully functional state after transitioning through phases of perturbation and recovery [ 7 , 8 ]. Unresolved disruptions in microbiota lead to loss of colonization resistance [ 9 ], deleterious health consequences such as Clostridioides difficile infection [ 10 ], and altered metabolic functions important for host food processing [ 11 ], drug metabolism [ 12 ], and endocrine homeostasis (e.g., appetite regulation) [ 13 ].…”

Revealing Protein-Level Functional Redundancy in the Human Gut Microbiome using Ultra-deep Metaproteomics

“…antibiotics/dietary shifts) and return to their original state. Being non-resilient, a microbiome is likely to shift its composition permanently and stay at an altered new state instead of restoring to its original state of equilibrium (Dogra et al, 2020;Folke et al, 2004). Collectively, we disassembled the FR into one-to-one comparisons of between-taxa functional activities, and found that a global shift in functional roles of microbes towards a more heterogeneous pattern was a factor driving the decrease of FR and alteration of states in inflamed area in IBD patients.…”