Transplanting Gut Microbes from Long-Lived Humans into Mice to Assess the Outcomes

It is well known that the gut microbiome is influential on long-term health, and undergoes detrimental changes with advancing age. Beneficial species decline, while inflammatory and otherwise unhelpful species prosper. The reasons for these changes are not well understood, but probably involve a combination of many factors, such as diet, immune dysfunction, and so forth. There is a growing interest in the research community in assessing the contribution of gut microbiome changes to degenerative aging, and finding ways to reverse those changes. The study noted here is less interesting for the presented data, and more interesting for demonstrating that one can in fact transplant gut microbes from a human to a mouse and expect to see results that mimic the quality of the human microbiome. Thus transplants from long-lived humans - with what is assessed via other measures to be a better, more youthful, more diverse gut microbiome - leads to healthier mice than is the case for transplants from an average older person with a more degraded gut microbiome. That this can be accomplished might lead to faster progress towards treatments that adjust the gut microbiome to a more beneficial state. The most direct, blunt approach to therapy is some form of fecal microbiota transplant from young donor to old individual. In short-lived animal species, this resets the gut microbiome to a more youthful state and extends healthy life. In human medicine, fecal microbiota transplants ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs