VL20: Human Microbiome: health, infection, and disease

Question 1

What things could be affecting microbiome?

Answer 1

dietary habits, age, genetic origin ,geografic origin?

Question 2

Name some possible functions of the human microbiome

Answer 2

fermenting unused energy
trainng immune system
preventing growth of pathogenic bacteria
regulating development of gut
producing vitamins
producing hormones

Question 3

What is one important questions about the microbiome?

Answer 3

do we all share an identifiable core microbiota and microbiome?

Question 4

what can we learn from the microbiome of the 3 people experiment?
How can we interpret the results?

Answer 4

biological importance does not have to be most abundant

Question 5

What 2 methods were used to identify the microbiome in the stomach? what did they find?

Answer 5

culture methods (only found helicobacter pylori)
molecular methods (100-250 species)

Question 6

How many body sites does a person have?

Answer 6

maaaaaaaaaaaaany

Question 7

Why fecal transplants?

Answer 7

can restore microbiota

Question 8

What is dysbiosis?

Answer 8

a change of the normal balance of species in the microbiome

so disease not due to 1 pathogen but to dysfunctional microbiome as awhole

Question 9

What is the keystone-pathogen hypothesis?

Answer 9

certain low-abundance microbial pathogens can orchestrate inflammatory disease by converting the benign microbiota into a dysbiotic one

Question 10

What diseases are affected by dysbiosis?

Answer 10

obesity the flora conditions the host and the host conditions the flora

gum disease

type 2 diabetes

colorectal cancer

conversion of bile acids has been effectivly changed by fecal microbiota transplant

Question 11

how can we study this?

Answer 11

metagenome-wide association studies: studying connections between human microbiome and disease

identify associations with a disease and later validate in extra experiments