sciencenewsline | You are what you eat, the old saying goes, but why
is that so? Researchers have known for some time that diet affects the
balance of microbes in our bodies, but how that translates into an
effect on the host has not been understood. Now, research in mice is
showing that microbes communicate with their hosts by sending out
metabolites that act on histones--thus influencing gene transcription
not only in the colon but also in tissues in other parts of the body.
The findings publish November 23 in Molecular Cell.
"This is the first of what we hope is a long, fruitful set of studies
to understand the connection between the microbiome in the gut and its
influence on host health," says John Denu, a professor of biomolecular
chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the
study's senior authors. "We wanted to look at whether the gut microbiota
affect epigenetic programming in a variety of different tissues in the
host." These tissues were in the proximal colon, the liver, and fat
tissue.
In the study, the researchers first compared germ-free mice with
those that have active gut microbes and discovered that gut microbiota
alter the host's epigenome in several tissues. Next, they compared mice
that were fed a normal chow diet to mice fed a Western-type diet--one
that was low in complex carbohydrates and fiber and high in fat and
simple sugars. Consistent with previous studies from other researchers,
they found that the gut microbiota of mice fed the normal chow diet
differed from those fed the Western-type diet.
"When the host consumes a diet that's rich in complex plant
polysaccharides (such as fiber), there's more food available for
microbes in the gut, because unlike simple sugars, our human cells
cannot use them," explains Federico Rey, an assistant professor of
bacteriology at UW-Madison and the study's other senior author.
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