Why are we doing this study?
Very long answer: Our microbiota, especially our gut microbiota, is intimately involved in our health. Microbes in our colon don’t just help us digest our food, help fight off pathogens, and make vitamins for us – scientists have recently learned they even help regulate our immune system and metabolism. We’re a long ways from figuring out the details of how that works, though, and there are undoubtedly many more health effects of the microbiota, both positive and negative, that we haven’t discovered yet.
Our situation is unprecedented, in an evolutionary sense. Humans have co-evolved with our microbiota over eons of time, which tends to favor mutually beneficial interactions. But in just a few decades, our developed-world lifestyle has changed dramatically in ways that affect the microbiota (examples range from diet to medical care to urbanization). A modern lifestyle has many advantages, but we can’t simply assume that the healthy microbial interactions of past generations will continue unchanged. Many scientists suspect that an altered microbiota contributes to many of the chronic diseases that are now our biggest health problems. In fact, the evidence is pretty strong that the microbiota are involved in some of the worst problems, like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
Powerful new techniques have become available in the past several years to investigate the complex microbial communities of our bodies, so we can now do studies that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Due to some recent major research projects around the world using these techniques, we are starting to get a reasonable ‘snapshot’ perspective of how the microbiota varies between body sites, between people, and (in some cases) between healthy states and certain diseases. However, we have much less information about how the human microbiota of a person changes over time, either when people are following their usual routine, or after unusual events that perturb the microbiota in various ways. We also have much less information about what the microbiota is actually doing. Most studies thus far have only tried to figure out which microbes are present, which is easier to assess.
We need a better understanding of the dynamics of the gut microbiota, both in terms of composition and in terms of function. We'd like to know what factors lead to stability or instability in these microbial communities, so that we can apply what we’re learning about how the gut microbiota influences human health. If we knew what factors stabilize the microbiota, we could try to ensure that a healthy community stays that way (even if things are happening that might disturb it), we might recognize when a community is in danger of shifting to a less healthy state, and we might be able to purposely destabilize an unhealthy community to help cure some diseases. Tracking the dynamics of the gut microbiota in a large number of healthy people will provide essential data to investigate and test hypotheses about the stability of these complex communities.
Our situation is unprecedented, in an evolutionary sense. Humans have co-evolved with our microbiota over eons of time, which tends to favor mutually beneficial interactions. But in just a few decades, our developed-world lifestyle has changed dramatically in ways that affect the microbiota (examples range from diet to medical care to urbanization). A modern lifestyle has many advantages, but we can’t simply assume that the healthy microbial interactions of past generations will continue unchanged. Many scientists suspect that an altered microbiota contributes to many of the chronic diseases that are now our biggest health problems. In fact, the evidence is pretty strong that the microbiota are involved in some of the worst problems, like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
Powerful new techniques have become available in the past several years to investigate the complex microbial communities of our bodies, so we can now do studies that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Due to some recent major research projects around the world using these techniques, we are starting to get a reasonable ‘snapshot’ perspective of how the microbiota varies between body sites, between people, and (in some cases) between healthy states and certain diseases. However, we have much less information about how the human microbiota of a person changes over time, either when people are following their usual routine, or after unusual events that perturb the microbiota in various ways. We also have much less information about what the microbiota is actually doing. Most studies thus far have only tried to figure out which microbes are present, which is easier to assess.
We need a better understanding of the dynamics of the gut microbiota, both in terms of composition and in terms of function. We'd like to know what factors lead to stability or instability in these microbial communities, so that we can apply what we’re learning about how the gut microbiota influences human health. If we knew what factors stabilize the microbiota, we could try to ensure that a healthy community stays that way (even if things are happening that might disturb it), we might recognize when a community is in danger of shifting to a less healthy state, and we might be able to purposely destabilize an unhealthy community to help cure some diseases. Tracking the dynamics of the gut microbiota in a large number of healthy people will provide essential data to investigate and test hypotheses about the stability of these complex communities.