Featured
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Article |
Wnt/β-catenin promotes gastric fundus specification in mice and humans
Wnt signalling is shown to be required for specification of the gastric fundus in mice, and was used to develop human gastric organoids with functional fundic cell types.
- Kyle W. McCracken
- , Eitaro Aihara
- & James M. Wells
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Outlook |
Microbiota: Reseeding the gut
Transplants of faecal matter have done wonders for the treatment of certain gastrointestinal infections. Will they ever work for inflammatory bowel disease?
- Liam Drew
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Letter |
Modelling human development and disease in pluripotent stem-cell-derived gastric organoids
The in vitro generation, from pluripotent stem cells, of three-dimensional human gastric organoids (hGOs) that contain a physiological gastric epithelium comprising both progenitor and differentiated cell types, and have expected functional characteristics is described, as is modelling the pathophysiological response of the human stomach to Helicobacter pylori using these hGOs.
- Kyle W. McCracken
- , Emily M. Catá
- & James M. Wells
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Outlook |
Microbiome: Cultural differences
Studies of gut bacteria are beginning to untangle how diet affects health in old age — but determining cause and effect is tricky.
- Virginia Hughes
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Article |
Genomic variation landscape of the human gut microbiome
A framework for metagenomic variation analysis to explore variation in the human microbiome is developed; the study describes SNPs, short indels and structural variants in 252 faecal metagenomes of 207 individuals from Europe and North America.
- Siegfried Schloissnig
- , Manimozhiyan Arumugam
- & Peer Bork
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News & Views |
Resident risks
An innovative method for probing the genomes of the vast community of microorganisms that inhabit the human gut provides an alternative approach to identifying risk factors for type 2 diabetes. See Letter p.55
- Julia Oh
- & Julia A. Segre
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Article |
A metagenome-wide association study of gut microbiota in type 2 diabetes
The authors have developed a new method, metagenome-wide association study (MGWAS), to compare the combined genetic content of the faecal microbiota of healthy people versus patients with type 2 diabetes; they identify multiple microbial species and metabolic pathways that are associated with either cohort and show that some of these may be used as biomarkers.
- Junjie Qin
- , Yingrui Li
- & Jun Wang
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Review Article |
Diversity, stability and resilience of the human gut microbiota
- Catherine A. Lozupone
- , Jesse I. Stombaugh
- & Rob Knight
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Review Article |
Functional interactions between the gut microbiota and host metabolism
- Valentina Tremaroli
- & Fredrik Bäckhed
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Review Article |
Reciprocal interactions of the intestinal microbiota and immune system
- Craig L. Maynard
- , Charles O. Elson
- & Casey T. Weaver
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Research Highlights |
Infection breaks truce
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News & Views |
Antibiotics and adiposity
Mice receiving low doses of certain antibiotics gain weight and accumulate fat. This could be because some gut bacteria survive the treatment better than others, shifting digestion towards greater energy provision. See Article p.621
- Harry J. Flint
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News & Views |
Malnutrition promotes rogue bacteria
Dietary lack of a single amino acid impairs intestinal immunity in mice, altering the guts microbial community and leaving it vulnerable to damage. The finding helps to explain how malnutrition favours gut inflammation. See Letter p.477
- Ana Izcue
- & Fiona Powrie
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News & Views |
Fat, bile and gut microbes
Western-style diets could be contributing to the rapid increase in inflammatory bowel disease. New research suggests that dietary fat can alter bile composition and so favour the growth of pro-inflammatory gut microbes. See Letter p.104
- Peter J. Turnbaugh
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Research Highlights |
Good microbes fight bad
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Outlook |
Medical devices: Managed by machine
Artificial pancreases promise to take the decision-making — and human mistakes — out of managing type 1 diabetes.
- Elie Dolgin
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Outlook |
Microbiome: The critters within
Your gut microflora might be aiding and abetting diabetes.
- Lauren Gravitz
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Research Highlights |
How gut flora can turn deadly
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News |
Microbiome sequencing offers hope for diagnostics
Scientists try to avoid the hype that dogs human-genome research.
- Ed Yong
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Research Highlights |
A pulsating gut on a chip
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News |
Gut microbial 'enterotypes' become less clear-cut
Communities of gut bacteria may form a spectrum rather than falling into distinct groups.
- Ed Yong
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Letter |
Tissue factor and PAR1 promote microbiota-induced intestinal vascular remodelling
Colonization of germ-free mice with microbiota promotes vascular growth in the small intestine through a mechanism involving tissue factor, PAR1 and Ang1.
- Christoph Reinhardt
- , Mattias Bergentall
- & Fredrik Bäckhed
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Letter |
Extrathymically generated regulatory T cells control mucosal TH2 inflammation
Selective impairment of peripheral regulatory T-cell differentiation is found to result in spontaneous allergic TH2-type inflammation in the intestine and lungs, demonstrating the functional heterogeneity of regulatory T cells generated in the thymus and extrathymically in controlling immune mediated inflammation and disease.
- Steven Z. Josefowicz
- , Rachel E. Niec
- & Alexander Y. Rudensky
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Outlook |
Microbiome: That healthy gut feeling
Many ingredients in traditional herbal medicines cannot be absorbed by the human gut. Could our microbial inhabitants do for us what we can't do ourselves?
- James Mitchell Crow
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Letter |
Acquisition of a multifunctional IgA+ plasma cell phenotype in the gut
IgA secreting plasma cells in the lamina propria are shown to be an important source of iNOS and TNF required to maintain the homeostatic balance between intestinal microbes and the immune system.
- Jörg H. Fritz
- , Olga Lucia Rojas
- & Jennifer L. Gommerman
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Outlook |
Microbiome: Gut reaction
Microbes are under the spotlight in efforts to unravel — and combat — allergies.
- Cassandra Willyard
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News |
Friendly bacteria move in mysterious ways
Probiotic yoghurts have only a small effect on gut bacteria.
- Ed Yong
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Letter |
Commensal microbiota and myelin autoantigen cooperate to trigger autoimmune demyelination
- Kerstin Berer
- , Marsilius Mues
- & Gurumoorthy Krishnamoorthy
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News |
Microbes help giant pandas overcome meat-eating heritage
Researchers find the microorganisms that help bears digest bamboo.
- Ewen Callaway
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Letter |
Peripheral education of the immune system by colonic commensal microbiota
- Stephanie K. Lathrop
- , Seth M. Bloom
- & Chyi-Song Hsieh
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Letter |
A reserve stem cell population in small intestine renders Lgr5-positive cells dispensable
- Hua Tian
- , Brian Biehs
- & Frederic J. de Sauvage
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News |
Social network wants to sequence your gut
MyMicrobes project will gather DNA data from online community.
- Nicola Jones
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News |
Friendly bacteria cheer up anxious mice
Probiotics affect behaviour and brain chemistry.
- Nicola Jones
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Letter |
Control of TH17 cells occurs in the small intestine
- Enric Esplugues
- , Samuel Huber
- & Richard A. Flavell
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Review Article |
Human nutrition, the gut microbiome and the immune system
- Andrew L. Kau
- , Philip P. Ahern
- & Jeffrey I. Gordon
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News & Views |
In command of commensals
Humans must maintain a balanced composition for the trillions of commensal microbes that inhabit their gut, but how they do this is largely unclear. It now emerges that one factor is a molecular pathway in gut epithelial cells.
- Menno van Lookeren Campagne
- & Vishva M. Dixit
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News |
Reprogrammed cells repair damaged livers
Proof-of-principle study could point the way to averting the need for liver transplants.
- Heidi Ledford
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Letter |
Induction of functional hepatocyte-like cells from mouse fibroblasts by defined factors
- Pengyu Huang
- , Zhiying He
- & Lijian Hui
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News |
Gut study divides people into three types
Bacterial populations fall into three distinct classes that could help to personalize medicine.
- Nicola Jones
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Article |
Gut flora metabolism of phosphatidylcholine promotes cardiovascular disease
This paper shows that gut flora can influence cardiovascular disease, by metabolizing a dietary phospholipid. Using a metabolomics approach it is found that plasma levels of three metabolites of dietary phosphatidylcholine—choline, betaine and TMAO—are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease in humans. The gut flora is known to have a role in TMAO formation from choline, and this paper shows that dietary choline supplementation enhances macrophage foam cell formation and lesion formation in atherosclerosis-prone mice, but not if the gut flora are depleted with antibiotics.
- Zeneng Wang
- , Elizabeth Klipfell
- & Stanley L. Hazen
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News |
Do gut bacteria worsen malnourishment?
Human microbiota could be behind why deficient diets leave only some children seriously ill.
- Nicola Jones
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Letter |
Reduction of disulphide bonds unmasks potent antimicrobial activity of human β-defensin 1
This paper shows that the activity of human beta-defensin 1 is regulated by its redox status, with enhanced antibiotic killing activity under reducing conditions as they are found in the distal colon. This is believed to serve to protect the healthy intestinal epithelium against potentially harmful colonization by commensal bacteria and opportunistic fungi. In vitro evidence implicates thioredoxin as the likely reducing agent.
- Bjoern O. Schroeder
- , Zhihong Wu
- & Jan Wehkamp
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Letter |
mTORC1 controls fasting-induced ketogenesis and its modulation by ageing
During periods of fasting the liver produces ketone bodies, which the peripheral tissues can use as a source of energy. Here it is shown that fasting inhibits multi-component mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) in the liver. Inhibition of mTORC1 is required for activation of PPARα, a master regulator that switches on genes involved in ketogenesis. Livers from aged mice have increased mTORC1 signalling, reduced PPARα activity, and reduced ketone production. The observation that mTORC1 promotes an ageing phenotype in the liver fits well with the observation that inhibition of this pathway increases lifespan in several organisms.
- Shomit Sengupta
- , Timothy R. Peterson
- & David M. Sabatini
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News |
Germans cook up liver project
Biologists join physicists in a bid to map the workings of the human organ at all scales.
- Alison Abbott
Bile salt hydrolase acyltransferase activity expands bile acid diversity
Genomic approaches to studying the human microbiota
On the growth and form of the gut
Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome