Medicine in Microecology最新文献

Thyroid associated ophthalmopathy (TAO) manifests as orbital adipose hyperplasia, leading to high intraocular pressure, severe pain, and blindness. The underlying factors that trigger the abnormal immune process in TAO remain unknown. Here, we aim to test the hypothesis thata microbiome exists in TAO adipose tissue and are associated with TAO. We combined 16S rRNA gene sequencing and Tyramide signal amplification-fluorescence in situ hybridization of the orbital fat samples (size of 1 ​cm∗1 ​cm∗0.5 ​cm) from 36 with TAO ophthalmic patients, including 36 with TAO and 38 non-TAO ophthalmic patients as controls. We also collected environmental samples to perform decontamination using source-tracking algorithms. Bacterial staining signals were observed in both TAO and control sections. 6.2% of the bacterial community from orbital fat passed stringent decontamination against environmental samples. We identified four microbiome types in orbital fat, one of which was exclusive to TAO patients. Similarly, we found a higher proportion of Pseudomonas in TAO, but a lower proportion of Enhydrobacter. Flavobacterium was positively correlated with chemosis. For the first time, we provide evidence for the presence of bacteria in orbital fat tissue which are associated with TAO. Whether this orbital fat microbiome plays a causal role in the pathogenesis and manifestation of TAO requires further investigation.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a multisystem genetic disease which affects numerous organs in the body. Patients with CF exhibit profound alterations in the gastrointestinal microbiome, characterised by an increase in pathogenic bacteria and reduction in beneficial commensal species, accompanied by intestinal inflammation. The proposed pathophysiology of these gastrointestinal changes is multifactorial, driven primarily by dysfunction of the CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) protein, and secondarily by medications and the high-fat CF diet. Increasingly, the gastrointestinal microbiome is being recognised as an endocrine-like organ which regulates the function of multiple organs via direct transmission of microbes and metabolites, inflammatory pathways, immunological crosstalk, and other mechanisms. This article aims to review how the gut microbiome in CF may influence other affected organs, including the intestines, lungs (gut-lung axis), liver (gut-liver axis), bones (gut-bone axis), pancreas (gut-pancreas axis), and brain (gut-brain axis). Further research is required to better understand the potential role of the gut microbiome in CF multisystem disease, and the therapeutic utility of gut and multi-organ axes in CF.

Lung cancer is becoming one of the most detrimental cancers with the highest morbidity and mortality rate of all cancers, posing a significant burden for the global health system. Nonetheless, the therapeutic efficacy of traditional lung cancer therapies still remains relatively unsatisfying with varied responsiveness and unexpected adverse effects. Fortunately, studies have reported that an intimate relationship might exist between microbiota and lung carcinoma. Notably, microbial dysbiosis might result in changes in the metabolism, induction of immunosuppression, and recruitment of inflammatory factors, thereby driving lung carcinogenesis. Certain microbial strains were identified to be specifically enriched in the lung tumor beds, indicating their predictive role in lung cancer. Furthermore, the particular microbial composition was also proved to potentiate the outcomes of lung cancer therapies, suggesting that lung and gut microbiome were promising to be clinically applied for lung cancer therapy. In this review, we will comprehensively summarize the recent findings on how microbes mediate the initiation, progression, and treatment of lung cancer, illustrating the potential mechanisms and probing into the putative manipulation of microbiota to facilitate lung cancer treatments.

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common gastrointestinal cancers. 90% patients in the early stages of colorectal cancer can survive at least 5 years. However, most patients are diagnosed at terminal stages due to insignificant symptoms in early times and the traumatic pathological diagnosis methods. Previous studies have reported that the gut microbiome differs between healthy and colorectal cancer patients, which opens a new door to non-invasive diagnostic methods. The key prerequisite for colorectal cancer detection using the gut microbiome is the identification of effective markers. In this mini-review, we summarized the existing approaches of colorectal cancer screening based on gut microbiome in experimental design, markers selection and identification methods, and also proposed potential solutions to colorectal cancer detection and prediction using the gut microbiome, which could potentially improve detection accuracy as well as reduce costs.

Human microbiome research is critical to understanding the causes and complications of non-communicable diseases. However, this research is primarily focused on the gut microbiota, which limits our understanding of how other microbiotas in the body further contribute or confound some observations. Further, investigations into other body sites are critical to understand how the immune system holistically interacts with the microbiome. By performing multi-site and multi-omics approaches, the human body can be considered as a system, with interacting parts. An appreciation for the relationships between an individual's distinct microbiomes, micro-environments, and the human host will likely provide advancements in preventing or treating non-communicable diseases.

The human body harbors a myriad of microbial communities with the highest concentration and diversity found within the intestine whose disturbance is associated with many diseases. The potential of gut microbiota modulation to confer health benefits has resulted in tremendous efforts of testing extrinsic materials, e.g., probiotics, prebiotics, diet modulation and fecal microbiota transplantation. Meanwhile, the assembly of gut microbiota follows its intrinsic rules, including host selective pressures, bacteria-bacteria interactions, fungi-bacteria interactions, and virus-bacteria interactions. Understanding how these intrinsic factors and mechanisms shape the indigenous gut microbiota can provide crucial knowledge to guide evidence-based microbiota modulation therapies. Hence, this review focuses on our current understanding of the gut microbiota assemblage shaped by host, resident bacteria, fungi as well as virus.

The surface of the female lower genital tract is covered with squamous epithelium, and some bacteria and fungi reside in the cavity. Among them, the dominant Lactobacillus maintain the acidic environment of the vagina. The acidic environment, squamous epithelium barrier, mucus and innate immune response together resist the invasion of pathogens and local homeostasis. Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a disorder of the vaginal microbiota, which is characterized by a shift in the vaginal flora from the dominant Lactobacillus to a polymicrobial anaerobic flora accompanied by an increase in pH ​> ​4.5. Its high recurrence rate, obvious clinical symptoms, and possible adverse pregnancy outcome seriously disturb women's healthy life. However, its pathogenesis is still elusive. The vaginal microenvironment includes not only microbiota, but also microbially and host-produced metabolites, and vaginal local immunity. Given the inseparable relationship between the microbiota and its metabolites and the immune response, it is important to study how these interactions regulate vaginal local immunity to resist pathogens. In this review, we will discuss the main theories of BV etiology, which eventually involves the interaction between BV-related pathogens, small molecular metabolites, and host immune responses in the vagina.

Intrauterine adhesions (IUAs) are important causes of female infertility, mainly but not always caused by iatrogenic endometrial injury. The microbiome of the female reproductive tract, including the vagina and uterine cavity, plays an important role in health and disease. Immune regulation imbalance caused by reproductive tract microecological disorders can act in the formation mechanism of IUAs. Here we collected clinical laboratory indicators, the vaginal secretions and uterine secretions of 6 women with and 8 women without IUAs, with a history of curettage. Vaginal and uterine cavity microbes were detected by high-throughput sequencing technology. Compared with the women without IUAs, the proportion of Lactobacillus in vaginal microbes was decreased and the proportion of Bacteroides was increased in the IUAs. The α-diversity index in the vaginal microbiome was significantly positively correlated with the hematocrit and erythrocyte count (P ＜0.05). These clinical and microbiological indicators could be used to indicate the occurrence of IUAs, so this study has clinical guiding significance for detecting and preventing them.

Microbiome biomarker-based modeling has been widely used in classifying health states. However, many diseases do not have explicit biomarkers, or exhibit shortages in detection accuracy using specific species. Based on microbiome big data and cutting-edge computing engine, here we report the search-based strategy of health status detection for shotgun metagenomes. Comparing the species-level profiles against large-scale metagenomes, outlier samples are screened out as unhealthy, and their detailed disease types can be identified by top matches. Benchmarking on a multi-cohort dataset with over 3,000 metagenomes, the search-based approach achieved a promising overall accuracy that was superior to marker-based models constructed by random forest (RF), supporting vector machine (SVM) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). More importantly, the search-based method also featured a balanced performance on different diseases. Hence, this case study further demonstrates the potential and capability of metagenome big data in human health, as well as moves one-step forward of search-based approach in microbiome research and application.