Drama king: Your gut bacteria

As for microbial 'drama king', it must say human gut bacteria which attracts your attention all the time! They're associated with nearly all aspects of your health. A series of frontier research results showed this:

1. Charbonneau M , O'Donnell, David, Blanton L , et al. Sialylated Milk Oligosaccharides Promote Microbiota-Dependent Growth in Models of Infant Undernutrition[J]. Cell, 2016, 164(5):859-871.
2. Tang A T , Choi J P , Kotzin J J , et al. Endothelial TLR4 and the microbiome drive cerebral cavernous malformations[J]. Nature, 2017, 545(7654):305.
3. Liu B, Fang F, Pedersen N L, et al. Vagotomy and Parkinson disease[J]. Neurology, 2017, 88(21):1996-2002.
4. Rothhammer V , Borucki D M , Tjon E C , et al. Microglial control of astrocytes in response to microbial metabolites[J]. Nature, 2018.
5. Giada De Palma, Michael D. J. Lynch, Jun Lu, et al. Transplantation of fecal microbiota from patients with irritable bowel syndrome alters gut function and behavior in recipient mice, Science Translational Medicine 01 Mar 2017.
6. Ma C , Han M , Heinrich B , et al. Gut microbiome–mediated bile acid metabolism regulates liver cancer via NKT cells[J]. Science, 2018, 360(6391):eaan5931.
7. Atsushi Hayashi et al. Intestinal Dysbiosis and Biotin Deprivation Induce Alopecia through Overgrowth of Lactobacillus murinus in Mice, Cell Reports (2017).

The human gut microbiota refers to the all the microorganisms that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract. Diverse roles of the gut microbiota in human health and disease have been recognized. Metagenomic studies have transformed our understanding of the taxonomic and functional diversity of human microbiota, but more than half of the sequencing reads from a typical human fecal metagenome cannot be mapped to existing bacterial reference genomes3,4 . The lack of high-quality reference genomes has become an obstacle for high-resolution analyses of the human gut microbiome.

A new study shows, in a paper published in Nature biotechnology, that the Culturable Genome Reference (CGR), a collection of 1,520 nonredundant, high-quality draft genomes generated from >6,000 bacteria cultivated from fecal samples of healthy humans. Of the 1,520 genomes, which were chosen to cover all major bacterial phyla and genera in the human gut, 264 are not represented in existing reference genome catalogs.

The CGR will improve metagenomic analyses, genome variation analyses, functional characterization and pan-genome analyses. The isolated gut bacteria strains have been deposited in the China National GeneBank (CNGB), the accession ID is CNP0000126. which may be useful for studies that aim to alter microbiota functions, as novel probiotics, or for verification of disease-associated bacterial markers.

Reference: Zou Y, Xue W, Luo G, et al. 1,520 reference genomes from cultivated human gut bacteria enable functional microbiome analyses[J]. Nature biotechnology, 2019, 37(2): 179.