The human microbiome: at the interface of health and disease

Top Cited Papers
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The human microbiome and its relationship to disease is a new and rapidly evolving field of study. The co-evolution between hosts and their microbiomes has led to cooperative interactions in metabolism and homeostasis. Concepts from community ecology — such as resilience, community disturbances and extinction — are useful in understanding the microbiome. New computational and statistical tools are being developed to analyse the large sequence data sets that are generated by the increasingly powerful technologies. The taxonomic composition and functional characteristics of the microbiome may allow individuals to be categorized into different microbial patterns, called enterotypes, in the gastrointestinal tract. Although low-level taxonomy varies substantially among individuals, higher-level taxonomy and functional characteristics seem to be largely preserved. Many factors affect the composition of the microbiome over the course of a human lifetime. These include inheritance, the mode of infant delivery, diet and age-related changes in adults. The relationships between the microbiome and several human diseases are being intensively studied for conditions that include colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and immunologically mediated skin diseases. Causal relationships for many of the associations between the microbiome and disease states have yet to be proven. Understanding the links between the microbiome and human disease may provide prophylactic or therapeutic tools to improve human health.