Gut microbiota plays critical physiological roles in the energy extraction and in the control of local or systemic immunity. Gut microbiota and its disturbance also appear to be involved in the pathogenesis of diverse diseases including metabolic disorders, gastrointestinal diseases, cancer, etc. In the metabolic point of view, gut microbiota can modulate lipid accumulation, lipopolysaccharide ...

Within the first few days of life, humans are colonized by commensal intestinal microbiota. Here, we review recent findings showing that microbiota are important in normal healthy brain function. We also discuss the relation between stress and microbiota, and how alterations in microbiota influence stress-related behaviors. New studies show that bacteria, including commensal, probiotic, and pat...

INTRODUCTION Accurate analyses of microbiota composition of low-density communities (10(3)-10(4) bacteria/sample) can be challenging. Background DNA from chemicals and consumables, extraction biases as well as differences in PCR efficiency can significantly interfere with microbiota assessment. This study was aiming to establish protocols for accurate microbiota analysis at low microbial densit...

BACKGROUND Oral vancomycin remains the mainstay of therapy for severe infections produced by Clostridium difficile, the most prevalent cause of healthcare-associated infectious diarrhoea in developed countries. However, its short- and long-term effects on the human intestinal microbiota remain largely unknown. METHODS We utilized high-throughput sequencing to analyse the effects of vancomycin...

The human gut is home to a vast number of bacteria, the microbiota, whose genomes complement our own set of genes. The gut microbiota functions at the intersection between host genotype and diet to modulate host physiology and metabolism, and recent data have revealed that the gut microbiota can affect obesity. The gut microbiota contributes to host metabolism by several mechanisms including in...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Antibiotics disturbing microbiota are often used in treatment of poststroke infections. A bidirectional brain-gut microbiota axis was recently suggested as a modulator of nervous system diseases. We hypothesized that gut microbiota may be an important player in the course of stroke. METHODS We investigated the outcome of focal cerebral ischemia in C57BL/6J mice after an...

BACKGROUND While our knowledge of the intestinal microbiota during disease is accumulating, basic information of the microbiota in healthy subjects is still scarce. The aim of this study was to characterize the intestinal microbiota of healthy adults and specifically address its temporal stability, core microbiota and relation with intestinal symptoms. We carried out a longitudinal study by fol...

Alterations in intestinal microbiota composition and function have been linked to conditions including functional gastrointestinal disorders, obesity and diabetes. The gut microbiome encodes metabolic capability in excess of that encoded by the human genome, and bacterially produced enzymes are important for releasing nutrients from complex dietary ingredients. Previous culture-based studies ha...

Plants associate—analogous to animals or us humans—with a multitude of microorganisms, which collectively function as a microbiome. A major discovery of the last decade is that numerous organisms of a microbiome (aka microbiota) are not unpretentious background actors. Instead, some microbiota members influence host processes including behavior, appetite, and health in animals (1) and contribut...

Most metazoans engage in mutualistic interactions with their intestinal microbiota. Despite recent progress the molecular mechanisms through which microbiota exerts its beneficial influences on host physiology are still largely uncharacterized. Here we use axenic Drosophila melanogaster adults associated with a standardized microbiota composed of a defined set of commensal bacterial strains to ...