#6 The microbiota and weight management
The Gordon Lab, a research group led by Jeffrey Gordon, director for the Center of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine has been at the forefront of research into the link between gut microflora and obesity.
Following a breakthrough paper in 2006 published in Nature (Vol. 444, pp. 1022-1023, 1027-1031) the group has continued to push back the boundaries of our understanding in this emerging area, and earlier this reported that transplanting gut bacteria from obese humans into germ-free mice leads to greater weight gain and fat accumulation than mice that were given bacteria from the guts of lean humans.
The findings show that weight and fat gain is influenced by communities of microbes in the gut and their effect on the physical and metabolic traits of the host, leading to metabolic changes in the rodents that are associated with obesity in humans.
The data, published in Science, may represent an important step toward developing new personalized probiotic and food-based therapies for the treatment or prevention of obesity, according to the researchers.
To read our report on this study, and the reaction from leading probiotic and prebiotic researchers, please click here.