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Gut microbes regroup to aid defence after infection

Resident gut microbes can help to block infection, but the mechanisms involved are not fully understood. It has now been found that changes in the microbial community after infection boost the level of a molecule that combats harmful bacteria.
  1. Melissa M. Kendall

    1. Melissa M. Kendall is in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908, USA.

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  2. Vanessa Sperandio

    1. Vanessa Sperandio is in the Departments of Microbiology and Biochemistry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas 75390, USA.

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Complex interactions between a mammalian host and its intestinal microbiota (the community of microorganisms that reside in the small and large intestines) influence host health and disease susceptibility. A major challenge in delving into the mechanistic relationships driving such interactions is the high diversity of species in the microbiota, which gives rise to a microbial profile that is unique to each individual1, much as a fingerprint is. There is a growing appreciation that the gut microbiota is implicated in generating resistance to gut colonization by disease-causing microorganisms (pathogens). However, many studies of this phenomenon have been largely descriptive, and have tended to correlate only particular microbiota compositions with a state of health or disease2. Writing in Cell, Stacy et al.3 present a detailed mechanism that reveals how changes to the microbiota drive resistance to invasion by pathogens.

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Nature 592, 29-31 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00642-7

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