Vulnerability of the industrialized microbiota

Abstract

The human body is an ecosystem that is home to a complex array of microbes known as the microbiome or microbiota. This ecosystem plays an important role in human health, but as a result of recent lifestyle changes occurring around the planet, whole populations are seeing a major shift in their gut microbiota. Measures meant to kill or limit exposure to pathogenic microbes, such as antibiotics and sanitation, combined with other factors such as processed food, have had unintended consequences for the human microbial ecosystem, including changes that may be difficult to reverse. Microbiota alteration and the accompanying loss of certain functional attributes might result in the microbial communities of people living in industrialized societies being suboptimal for human health. As macroecologists, conservationists, and climate scientists race to document, understand, predict, and delay global changes in our wider environment, microbiota scientists may benefit by using analogous approaches to study and protect our intimate microbial ecosystems.

Gut microbial diversity and stabilizing functions enhance the plateau adaptability of Tibetan wild ass (Equus kiang)

“…However, the content of pathogenic bacteria increased in the captive group, such as Fusobacteria (Roggenbuck et al, ) and Tenericutes (Ludwig, Euzéby, & Whitman, ), which increases their risk to catch diseases to some extent. Industrialized food affects the diversity and function of the gut microbiome (Sonnenburg & Sonnenburg, ). This suggests that the kiang in the wild winter group had the best health, followed by the wild summer group, while the captive summer group had the worst health.…”

Defensive Symbioses in Social Insects Can Inform Human Health and Agriculture

“…While efforts to eliminate pathogens have substantial impacts, most notably with vaccines eliminating smallpox and reducing other disease to 99% fewer cases (Orenstein and Ahmed, 2017), practices for sharing beneficial microbes could also be valuable for medicine and agriculture. These practices may include fecal microbiota transplants, probiotic and prebiotic supplementation (George Kerry et al, 2018;Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg, 2019), creating built environments that favor beneficial microbes (Kembel et al, 2012); however, besides perhaps fecal microbiota transplants for treating C. difficile, these practices currently lack substantial evidence of efficacy.…”

Potential Immunomodulatory Activity of a Selected Strain Bifidobacterium bifidum H3-R2 as Evidenced in vitro and in Immunosuppressed Mice

“…The gut microbiota ecosystem has a profound influence on host health ( Cox et al, 2014 ; Dong and Gupta, 2019 ), and is directly involved in the development and modulation of the immune system by enhancing host defense mechanisms such as promoting mucosal barrier function and enhancing immune responses ( Kamada et al, 2013 ; Matamoros et al, 2013 ; Feng et al, 2018 ). However, several endogenous and environmental factors can have impacts on both the composition and functionality of the gut microbiota throughout life ( Candela et al, 2015 ; Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg, 2019 ).…”