Blog #3

The human microbiome can be defined as the ecological communities of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms, and it is oftentimes referred to as the metagenome. This is because of its ability to predict “complex” human diseases alongside human genomes. According to this article, microbiota is even seen as a better predictor of certain diseases than the human genome because of its vulnerability to the host’s environment. Its sensibility to the environment allows it to change and better predict phenotypic changes in a host that characterize an illness. The microbiota has become a topic of high interest in treating and diagnosing illnesses.

Since the microbiome is being studied more than ever before, new findings reported by this article say that they have observed associations between the microbiome and cardiovascular, neurologic, respiratory, metabolic, gastrointestinal, and hepatic diseases. Specifically, the gut’s microbiome has been the subject of talk and study due to its association with many diseases such as parasitic diseases. Oftentimes these parasitic illnesses are seen only in context within the host and outside factors that effect the microbiome, such as diet, are oftentimes ignored. This article analyzes the relationship between diet, the microbiome, and parasitises. It concludes that it is possible to change a host’s resistance to parasitic infections by altering diet, and in effect, altering the microbiome, however, even more studies are needed to solidify these observations.

The onocobiome has also become a topic of interest recently due to the observed link between the microbiome and the changes it can cause in the immune system that can lead to cancer. According to this article, the microbiome has the power to change the way the body responds to anticancer drugs through its systemic effects on hosts. It also explains that there have been certain microbial species identified throughout the progression of cancer in a host. In class we discusses about the reappearance of Helicobacter pylori in many cases of gastric cancers. The microbiome should definitely continue to be studied because of its sensitivity to the environment that makes it a better predictor for some diseases than DNA. The continued study of the microbiome is also important because we could find new ways of preventing or treating illnesses due to the microbiome’s reactibility to the environment. Lastly, it is important to continue looking into the patterns of microbial species within certain illnesses because it could lead us to finding better ways to treat said illnesses.