FIXING MALNUTRITION USING GUT MICROBES.

Malnutrition affects millions of people worldwide and is responsible for one-fifth of deaths in children under the age of five. Children can also experience impaired cognitive development and stunted growth. A new research into malnutrition has been carried out by creating an animal model that replicates the imbalance of gut bacteria associated with the difficult-to-treat disease. The problem arises when people don't have enough food to eat and their diet lacks proper nutrients. The disease also has a lot to do with environmental factors and it has been a challenge to develop treatments to reverse malnutrition. Everyone thought that you simply needed to feed people and they'd be fine, but it didn't work," said Brett Finlay, a professor of microbiology and biochemistry at UBC. "The gut bacteria model allows us to figure out what's going on and to think about ways to fix it. According to Finlay and UBC PhD student Eric Brown, malnutrition can be difficult to treat because it affects the good bacteria that live in the gut. People suffering from malnutrition often show signs of a disease known as environmental enteropathy, which is an inflammatory disorder of the small intestine and is likely caused by ingesting pathogenic fecal bacteria early in life from a contaminated environment. This shifts the balance of the original healthy bacteria in the gut and leads to poor absorption of nutrients. The study was published in Nature Communications, shows how the team developed a mouse model to reproduce the symptoms of environmental enteropathy and malnourishment. The team observed how a malnourished diet has a strong, measurable impact on the microbes in the small intestine. This new model gives the opportunity to examine the impact of malnutrition on gut microbiology and assess the role of infections. Another study reported by American Association for the Advancement of Science explains further:Gut microbial species transferred from healthy children to mice can counter the detrimental effects caused by microbes from undernourished children.The study showing this goes on to identify certain species of microbe that offset malnutrition's negative effects, suggesting the possible role of the microbiota as a therapeutic intervention for malnutrition.They also demonstrated that an immature infant microbiota is correlated with stunted growth, compared to healthy controls. Mice colonized with microbiota from healthy donors gained significantly more weight and lean body mass than mice colonized with microbiota from undernourished donors. Co-housing mice with healthy and undernourished microbiota allowed the healthy microbiota to transfer into the guts of the undernourished mice and restored normal growth. Further investigation identified two species of microbes, Ruminococcus gnavus and Clostridium symbiosum, that alone fixed the impaired growth.