Science: What's new! Gut microorganisms may affect the body's metabolic processes!

September 16, 2020 // -- The 10 trillion bacteria that live in our digestive system may not be human, but they seem to be as integral to our body as the heart or liver of the body, and in recent years a growing number of studies have reported that gut microbes directly affect biological processes, from intestinal movements to body behavior; In a paper in which scientists from Rockefeller University and others revealed the molecular mechanisms by which gut microbes shape the body's metabolism, the researchers identified a particular type of intestinal neuron that controls the body's blood sugar levels and affects the body's appetite, and the findings may help develop treatments for body metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes, which are closely related to the body's blood sugar levels and to the composition of the gut microbiome.
'We all know that gut microbes produce special metabolites that simulate neurotransmitters and are detected by neuron cells in the gut,' said Dr. Paul Muller, a researcher at Rockefeller University.
The gut is surrounded by neurons, which in themselves can be seen as a nervous system, and the gut is often referred to by researchers as the body's second brain because of its complexity, which helps the body digest and move by looking at a variety of molecular cues, most of which are thought to come from our daily diet or gut microbes.
But these gut microbes are not evenly distributed throughout the digestive tract, with relatively few microbes at the beginning of the duobium and the vast majority at the end colon, and the researchers found that intestinal neurons may also be the same, with an analysis based on the type of protein produced in each part of the mouse's intestines showing that neurons actually function differently depending on their location.
In sterile mice, this gradient may decrease, in which case the number of neurons in areas with higher levels of microorganisms in the gut is similar to that of the microbial sparsely occurring heteroents, and these studies suggest that microorganisms may largely be the main cause of regional differences in neurons.
To test this theory, the researchers treated mice with antibiotics and found that reducing levels of bacteria could lead to a decline in the number of neurons in the mice's intestines, an effect that eventually disappears after antibiotic treatment is stopped, and that neurons near the end of the intestine are particularly affected. This suggests that it is particularly dependent on the role of gut microbes, and the researchers found that the absence of these neurons may have been mediated by neuron expression in inflammatory sensory pathfles, which previous studies have shown control neurons during intestinal infections.
Currently researchers don't know the key role these microbial-regulating neurons play in the health of the body, so the researchers engineered mice to selectively control the neuron substates in the return and colon, to the surprise of the researchers. When activated, the mice's appetite declined while their blood sugar levels rose; removing the same neurons had the opposite effect; and in mice that lost a subpopon of neurons, the researchers did not observe a change in blood sugar levels in mice under the action of antibiotics.
To the researchers' surprise, only neurons that control parts of the gut may have such a huge impact on the metabolism of mice that the mechanism that regulates blood sugar seems to be independent of the brain, but through direct communication between the intestines, pancreas and liver, making the study more meaningful in developing new treatments for metabolic diseases later in life.
original source: Paul A. Muller, Fanny Matheis1, Marc Schneeberger, et al. Microbiota-modulated CART and enteric neurons autonomously blood glucose, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abd6176.