Dear Colleagues,

The intestinal microbial metabolism is a fundamental part of host metabolism and physiology. A range of microbial metabolites have been described to affect the function of distant organs. Scientific evidence suggests that the metabolism of resident microbiota in the gut may have a crucial role in health maintenance, and its alteration as a result of changes in microbiota structure and function may be accompanied by disordered physiological processes in the host. In the last years, number of studies have shown that the gut microbiota is closely related to cardiometabolic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.  Diet may affect the intestinal homeostasis by altering the microbial community, and consequently, the associated microbial metabolome with potential beneficial or harmful effects. Thus, dietary intervention may represent an important strategy to modulate the gut microbiota and its metabolic function for health maintenance as well as disease prevention. In this context, the search for bioactive compounds from edible natural sources with the potential to target the gut microbiota constituents and/or its metabolic capacity offers great opportunities to devise novel functional foods to improve health. In this area of research there is an increasingly number of important unsolved questions such as how certain microbial metabolites contribute to disease, how the microbiota can be shaped to prevent or alter the progression of a disease, or how inter-individual variations in gut microbiota impact the effect of bioactive food compounds, among others. Advances in this area are expected to be fueled by the increasingly growing application of next-generation sequencing and other omics technologies. With regard to this, a shift from studies focusing on describing microbial community composition to more function-oriented research on gut microbiota is expected. Thus, shot-gun metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics, meta-proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics will have a key role to unravel the complex links among diet, microbial metabolism and host health. Thus, a better understanding of the relationships between diet, gut microbiota and cardiometabolic health may help to improve the prevention and treatment of certain cardiometabolic diseases.

The topics that will be covered by this Special Issue include:

- Link between diet, microbial metabolism and cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes mellitus, non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases, etc.

- Relationship between specific gut microbial metabolites and cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes mellitus, non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases, etc.

- Association of microbial-derived metabolite levels with foods and dietary patterns.

- Evaluation and discovery of novel dietary precursors of relevant microbial metabolites.

- Metabolic fate of dietary precursors of microbial metabolites.

- Dietary strategies to modulate circulating microbial-derived metabolite levels.

- Effect of bioactive compounds from natural sources to modulate microbial metabolite generation.

- Influence of gut microbial activity on the availability and bioactivity of dietary compounds.

- Microbiota-mediated mechanisms of the effect of bioactive dietary constituents on microbial metabolite levels.

- Influence of inter-individual variation in the physiological effects of bioactive food compounds due to variation in the gut microbiota.

- Meta-omics approaches to study the interplay of food or bioactive food compounds with the gut microbiota in the context of particular diseases.

Dr. Carolina Simó
Dr. Virginia Garcia-Cañas
Guest Editors

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