A healthy human adult contains about 100 trillion bacterial cells, plus plenty of viruses, fungi, and other microscopic organisms. Together, they make up the microbiome, a vast community that changes how we digest food, how we respond to disease threats, and even how we think. But scientists are just scratching the surface of how our microscopic roommates affect our health.
Three interdisciplinary research teams in the Microbiota and Gastrointestinal Immunology Consortium (MAGIC) have received seed grants to drive new investigations into how the microbiome affects health. By powering partnerships between researchers at the University of Utah (the U) and other institutions, the grants, which are funded by the Cumming Foundation, are intended to foster intellectual collaboration as they spark new discoveries.
Promoting citizen science in multiple sclerosis patient communities
In multiple sclerosis (MS), the body’s own immune system attacks the nervous system, causing an array of serious symptoms that can include fatigue, sensory and movement problems, and changes to emotion or cognition. The gut microbiome can affect both the immune system and the nervous system. This prompted the researchers to wonder if lifestyle changes that affect the microbiome also have an impact on MS symptoms.
To answer this complex question, they aim to bring in people with MS, whose expertise stems from daily life, to start making hypotheses about how lifestyle impacts the microbiome and MS symptoms. The researchers are modifying an existing digital citizen science platform, “Gut Instinct,” to help people explore how different lifestyle activities, as well as having MS (or not), are associated with changes in the microbiome. The goal is to bring MS communities into the conversation with a cheap, accessible digital tool that prioritizes lived experience.
Research team:
- Vineet Pandey, PhD, assistant professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the U
- Catherine Lozupone, PhD, associate professor of interdisciplinary quantitative biology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Learning how viruses change bacterial behavior
Some common gut bacteria are usually harmless but can also cause diseases like inflammatory bowel disorder (IBD), raising the question of what triggers such microbes to cause health problems. The scientists think that one contributing factor could be viruses called bacteriophages, which infect gut bacteria but leave human cells alone.
Even though bacteriophages don’t infect human cells, they can prompt an immune reaction that may prevent their host bacteria from producing harmful substances. The research team will investigate this phenomenon further by comparing how the immune system responds to the same bacteria in people with and without IBD, figuring out which bacteriophage genes make a difference in this interaction, and testing if the immune response affects the viruses themselves.
Research team:
- June Round, PhD, professor of pathology at U of U Health
- Patrick Secor, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and cell biology at Montana State University
- Breck Duerkop, PhD, associate professor of immunology and microbiology at CU Anschutz Medical Campus
- Kyla Ost, PhD, assistant professor of immunology and microbiology at CU Anschutz Medical Campus
Investigating microbial contributors to sepsis risk
Sepsis, a severe, whole-body immune response to infection, is difficult to predict and often deadly. It often starts when bacteria in the gut microbiome end up elsewhere in the body, and though it can be caused by many species of bacteria, usually one bacterial species will dominate in a given patient. Researchers have extensively investigated the aspects of patient health that impact sepsis risk, but what makes a bacterial species more likely to become dangerous is relatively unknown.
The research team thinks that the answer may have to do with genetic diversity of each bacterial species. If a single bacterial species is more genetically diverse, they suspect, it’ll be more likely to thrive and expand, to the patient’s detriment. To test their hypothesis, they’ll compare gut microbiome samples from people with and without sepsis and ask if there are differences in within-species genetic diversity.
Research team:
- James Colbert, MD, assistant professor of infectious disease at CU Anschutz Medical Campus
- Daniel Leung, MD, professor of internal medicine at U of U Health
- Seth Walk, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Montana State University
By unraveling the dynamic interactions between human health and our complex microbial ecosystems, the funded research will ultimately help improve health care, according to Ryan O’Connell, PhD, professor and chief of microbiology and immunology at U of U Health. “The work to be supported by these seed grants will enable key advances in our understanding of critical areas of human health that clearly involve the microbiota,” O’Connell says. “These initial steps will undoubtedly pave the way for the development of novel approaches to diagnose and combat autoimmunity and infectious disease in the clinic.”