Microbiota - Community types

The human gut microbiota is different in all the humans being worldwide, so your microbiota is like your personal fingerprint. However, there are many similarities between different microbiota, and this information can be used by us to develop health biomarkers and to define therapeutic strategies.

The human gut consists in trillions of microbes and the whole ecosystem varies between individuals in diversity, distribution and abundance. In any ecosystem the selective pressures, disturbances and survival conditions are very important in defining the species leading to a distinct community type in that area. There was a study on human microbiome investigating the impact of possible steering factors such as the dietary habits. The observation underlines that certain combination of microbes, distribution and diversity can lead to a distinct community structure. But, even more important, the people can be grouped in 3 main groups, in a similar way to the blood group type. They can have a high number of Bacteroides, Prevotella or Ruminococcus. People eating a diet with less fibre and high in animal fat tend to have the Bacteroides community, people with a diet high in fibre and low in animal fat tend to have Prevotella community type and finally, was shown that every individual will have a gradient from high to low abundances on these three groups of bacteria. You can see that different dietary habits can support different microbes, and changes to diet can shift the percentage of each community type.

There is also the concept of the genes present in the microbial complex, which will define the potential of degrading complex fibres. So now the community type will also include this microbial gene into information. It turned out that some of us have high gene righness and others can have low gene richness. This low and high gene count can be used to separate individuals in a population. If you got inflammatory bowel disorder and obesity, you will usually have low gene richness. You are also more likely to get more weight than someone with high gene richness. All these concepts can be used to predict individual susceptibility to gain weight.

Even if the individual microbiota is different for each person, there are characteristics that are overlaping. Knowing how a community will respond to a diet and other pressures helps to develop health biomarkers and therapies.

Next post will be about twins and siblings microbiota.

Have a nice evening!
G.

Microbiota - dietary habits

As I promised, after i finished the Autism course, i will come back to the microbiota series.

Now, the course is finished, so we will talk today about dietary habits. We all know that our diet determine what our microbiota can feed off. So, knowing this, we can change our microbiota changing our diet.

How can we do that? Easy, but you need to learn about it. You want to lose weight, you will use a calorie deficit diet, and once you reached the desired weight, you stop. This move will have a drastic effect on your microbiota, but as soon as your eating habits are back to normal, your microbiota will regulate too, because it developed a stable state over the years, and that it is not easily disturbed.

I have read about an interesting study, where they switched the diets of a population of African-Americans with that of the rural Africans. The African-Americans were given a high fibre, low fat African style diet. The rural Africans were given high fat, low fibre Western style diet. After a while, the African style diet was shown to support beneficial microbes and improved function, the Western style diet increased the risk of cancer. This research shows how short dietary changes can affect our microbiome and health.

In order to understand the long term effects of dietary habits, the researchers studied a number of individuals from different countries. People from Western world with  a diet of high protein and low fibre content tend to have more Bacteroides bacteria. People from rural Africa tend to have more Prevotella bacteria. With all the advances regarding food, we are losing our ancestral microbiome due to changes in our dietary habits and surrounding environmental factors. This can have a negative effect on health, leading to diabetes development, colon cancer, I.B.D., all of them being more prevalent in the western world.

I hope you enjoyed this new introduction. Next post will be about community types.

See you soon.
G.

Future posts

I got many ideas on the future blog posts, but at the moment i am very busy trying to finish an Autism course quite quickly. After that i will come back to the microbiota articles, and then I wil follow with micronutrients. I have some ideas about rejuvenation, mind boosters, nootropics and treating senescence (anti-ageing strategies). But this is still ongoing.

I will give you some homework if you are curious by nature. Search about the 2 pathways activated by rapamycin, about liposomal glutathione levels decrease as we age , resveratrol, ginsengoids and how real are the pre-biotic products.

That's all for today.
Enjoy this beautiful summer.

G.

A real home

We are humans.
I just realised now, for a countless time, that I keep forgetting to listen to the voice of my soul. I became aware once more, and I am slowly reaching that deep level of peace and silence. I am back home. Where my real home is.

Welcome home, my friends! I wish you the same.

Macrobiota - mucus and milk fermentation

The food that you consume is the one feeding your microbiome. Everything that cannot be digested by yourself it is used by your microbiome, which will transform all these indigestible components into energy that it is used by you.

Some beneficial microbes nibble on you eating the mucus produced by your body, as the human body will produce around 10 liters of mucus every day. The mucus is made of a protein backbone with chains of sugar molecules attached to it, known as mucus glycans. Some microbes adapted to eat these glycan structures produced by our body. These microbes are specialized in the consumption of the host-produced glycans, such as in mucus. Another type of glycans produced by the human body are the human milk oligosaccharides. The glycans in mucus and human milk are structurally alike, they are awkward sugars, rarely found in plants. This is why not many microbes can degrade these glycans.

The dietary glycan starch is a sugar chain of only glucose molecules, while primary sugars of mucus and milk glycans are n-acetilglucosamine, fucose, manose and sialic acid. Because these can be used by the microbiota, they are considered pre-biotic substances to nurture specific microorganisms (who serve a beneficial and protective role for the most).

The group of bacteria specialized in the degradation of the human milk oligosaccharides are known as bifidobacteria. In early life , bifidobacteria plays a role in energy harvest for the infant, they also play a crucial role in the immune and metabolic imprinting. Later in life, permanent colonization of the mucosal layer also leads to immune and metabolic regulation contributing to the host health. Because many pathogens use mucus as a signal to attack, the beneficial mucus colonizing microbiota members will protect against such pathogens. The host tolerates microbes in the mucosal layer and even produce extra mucus when sensing their presence. Another reason of existence of awkward sugars is that, if all bacteria will degrade the mucosal layer, this could be problematic.

In conclusion, some microbiota members like eating the glycans from mucus and milk. Early life, they release energy from human milk, later in life they serve as a line of defense against pathogens. They also stimulate a healthy host immune and metabolic response. Our body will nurture specific members of the microbiota by producing special sugars.

Next post will be about long versus short dietary habits.

See you soon!
G.

Microbiota diet and disease

Probably everyone knows that our microbiota is an anaerobic chamber with trillions of bacteria which work together and their combined efforts help us break down food and harvest as much energy as possible from the food we eat. Our microbiota depends a lot on the food we consume. In return, it will help us to digest the food we consume. Without the bacteria from our gut, the nutritional value of our food would be a lot lower (we would probably eat 5 times as much food to reach the same energy levels).

When microbes start to degrade the fibers from our food, this process is called fermentation. Microbial fermentation is a common process used to produce food (cheese, beer, bread etc.). All these foods have microorganisms added to them during the making process, leading to special taste or alcohol. Our microbiota also carries out a wide range of fermentation processes, using anaerobic fermentation in order to sustain the inner environment. The bacteria ca ferment both sugar and protein from our food, leading to the production of many chemicals with energetic value, essential vitamins and health stimulating products that are released in our guts by the microbiota. Many compounds are short chain fatty acids such as lactic acid, acetate, butyrate and propionate. All these short chain fatty acids are a major source of energy for our intestinal cells. Almost 10% of the energy used by our intestinal cells comes from the microbial produced butyrate. The butyrate and the propionate have several health benefits (pain reduction and inflammation response reduction).

The microbiota is actually a microbial ecologic network, so, for optimal functionality, we need to have a microbial diverse microbiota. Our gut is an anaerobic chamber with trillions of bacteria working together and their combined effort helps us to break down food and to harvest as much energy as possible from the food we eat.

I will post next about mucus and milk fermentation.
See you soon!
G.

Microbiota cycle - reloaded

I have a new series of articles about the microbiota, all of them fascinating from some point of view. i will start soon with  microbiota diet and disease.

See you soon
G.