Gut microbial species work in groups to perform different tasks. (Photo: Bigstock)
October 9, 2019
By a staff writer
Natural Health News
Health News – Teamwork is the key to the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, and this has a huge impact on our overall health and well-being.
The human gut is home to bacteria that help us digest food, produce vitamins, and perform many other functions that affect our health.
But while most research focuses on the benefits of specific types of microbes, new research from King’s College London, published in the journal Communication of natureshows that gut microbial species work in groups to perform different tasks. This takes our understanding of the microbiome in a new direction and shows that culturing certain groups of bacteria is more important than just one type.
Researchers studied the gut bacteria, blood and feces of more than a thousand participating twins. TwinsUK. This allowed the team to conduct the first large-scale study of the relationship between the types of gut bacteria, their functions and metabolism in the gut and blood of the participants.
The team found that while strangers share only 43% of the species of gut bacteria, they still share 82% of the functions performed by groups of gut bacteria. This is because different types of bacteria can contribute to the same function and therefore different groups can work together to perform similar activities.
They then measured hundreds of molecules in the gut and bloodstream – representative of the metabolism of microbes and humans – and checked whether their abundance was more strongly related to the presence of particular types of microbes or microbial functions performed by groups of microbes.
Again, microbial functions are more important than single microbes, as they showed a greater number of associations with the molecular composition of both the gut environment and the blood.
A new focus
Therefore, this research suggests that health treatments designed to target our gut bacteria – and our metabolism – should focus on groups of gut bacteria that perform a specific function, rather than individual types of bacteria.
Lead author Dr Mario Falci, senior lecturer in bioinformatics at King’s College London, explained:
“We can think of our gut bacteria like Lego bricks—the color of the bricks is not as important as how they fit together to build something. With gut bacteria, individual species are not as important as a group working together to accomplish a task.”
“This is the first major study to explore the metabolic potential of the entire gut bacterial ecosystem. Our findings highlight the importance of studying groups of bacteria and their functions as a whole, rather than focusing on specific species. These results add to the growing evidence that gut bacteria are linked to human health.”
Falci and colleagues suggest that there is an extensive dialogue between our gut environment and our blood, and that 93% of this dialogue involves microbial functions. They say this may explain why gut microbes are so strongly linked to our health.
