Animal Microbiota: Securing Optimal Gene-Diet-Microbiota Interactions

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, microbiota-focused research on animal models has paved the way to developing a highly integrated approach to understand complex relationships between the host organism and both its associated and environmental microbial communities. Most importantly, the recent development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, combined with the rise of bioinformatics, has raised the curtain on an unsuspected microbial diversity, both in terms of taxonomy and functions, from highly extreme environments to host tissues previously thought of as sterile. Furthermore, animal models have revealed tight functional interactions between the host and their microbiota, such as regulating the metabolism, immune system maturation, and via the vagus nerve, brain development, and various behaviors. Awareness of the fact that microbiota extensively contribute to host biology has led the scientific community to rethink the study of any organism in a much more integrated way. These significant advances in the field of host–microbiota symbioses has led researchers to adapt the Holobiont concept formalized by Lynn Margulis (1993), which considers the host–microbiota system as a whole organism which, in light of the rise of metagenomics, was then viewed as a single unit of selection, as formally described in the hologenome (i.e., host genome + associated microbial genomes) concept by Richard Jefferson (1994) and later by Zilber-Rosenberg (2008). The most recent advances in animal microbiota studies shed a light on the fact that host–microbiota beneficial interactions can be broken by multiple stressors (including unbalanced nutrition), allowing opportunistic microbial strains to induce negative effects on the host, including physiological disturbances on neuroendocrine functions and epigenetics modifications.Overall, current research on animal microbiota focuses on integrative studies of gene-diet-microbiota interactions in order to tightly disentangle factors that influence host development. The outcomes are not only beneficial for the sustainability of the agrifood industry but also by revolutionizing personalized medicine.

Dr. Nicolas Derome
Guest Editor

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