Project description:Pancreatic cancer is the 3rd most prevalent cause of cancer related deaths in United states alone, with over 55000 patients being diagnosed in 2019 alone and nearly as many succumbing to it. Late detection, lack of effective therapy and poor understanding of pancreatic cancer systemically contributes to its poor survival statistics. Obesity and high caloric intake linked co-morbidities like type 2 diabetes (T2D) have been attributed as being risk factors for a number of cancers including pancreatic cancer. Studies on gut microbiome has shown that lifestyle factors as well as diet has a huge effect on the microbial flora of the gut. Further, modulation of gut microbiome has been seen to contribute to effects of intensive insulin therapy in mice on high fat diet. In another study, abnormal gut microbiota was reported to contribute to development of diabetes in Db/Db mice. Recent studies indicate that microbiome and microbial dysbiosis plays a role in not only the onset of disease but also in its outcome. In colorectal cancer, Fusobacterium has been reported to promote therapy resistance. Certain intra-tumoral bacteria have also been shown to elicit chemo-resistance by metabolizing anti-cancerous agents. In pancreatic cancer, studies on altered gut microbiome have been relatively recent. Microbial dysbiosis has been observed to be associated with pancreatic tumor progression. Modulation of microbiome has been shown to affect response to anti-PD1 therapy in this disease as well. However, most of the studies in pancreatic cancer and microbiome have remained focused om immune modulation. In the current study, we observed that in a T2D mouse model, the microbiome changed significantly as the hyperglycemia developed in these animals. Our results further showed that, tumors implanted in the T2D mice responded poorly to Gemcitabine/Paclitaxel (Gem/Pac) standard of care compared to those in the control group. A metabolomic reconstruction of the WGS of the gut microbiota further revealed that an enrichment of bacterial population involved in drug metabolism in the T2D group.
Project description:Recent evidence has demonstrated that the gut microbiome has marked effects on neuronal function and behavior. Disturbances to microbial populations within the gut have been linked to myriad models of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the role of the microbiome in substance use disorders remains understudied. Here we show that male mice with their gut microbiome depleted by nonabsorbable antibiotics (Abx) exhibit decreased formation of morphine conditioned place preference across a range of doses (2.5-15 mg/kg), have decreased locomotor sensitization to morphine, and demonstrate marked changes in gene expression within the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in response to high-dose morphine (20 mg/kg × 7 days). Replacement of short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) metabolites, which are reduced by microbiome knockdown, reversed the behavioral and transcriptional effects of microbiome depletion. This identifies SCFA as the crucial mediators of microbiome-brain communication responsible for the effects on morphine reward caused by microbiome knockdown. These studies add important new behavioral, molecular, and mechanistic insight to the role of gut-brain signaling in substance use disorders
Project description:HuMiChip was used to analyze human oral and gut microbiomes, showing significantly different functional gene profiles between oral and gut microbiome. The results were used to demonstarte the usefulness of applying HuMiChip to human microbiome studies.
Project description:Emerging data has highlighted the importance of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) on ruminal microbiome and derived metabolism profiling, and ruminal epithelial health and nutritional absorption in ruminants. However, little is known about the roles of SCFAs on ileal microbiome profiles. Here, we combined infusion of three SCFAs, to study their different roles in ileal microbiome succession profiling using a in vivo goat model.
Project description:Changes in cellular metabolism contribute to the development and progression of tumors, and can render tumors vulnerable to interventions. However, studies of human cancer metabolism remain limited due to technical challenges of detecting and quantifying small molecules, the highly interconnected nature of metabolic pathways, and the lack of designated tools to analyze and integrate metabolomics with other –omics data. Our study generates the largest comprehensive metabolomics dataset on a single cancer type, and provides a significant advance in integration of metabolomics with sequencing data. Our results highlight the massive re-organization of cellular metabolism as tumors progress and acquire more aggressive features. The results of our work are made available through an interactive public data portal for cancer research community.
Project description:Cocaine use disorder represents a public health crisis with no FDA-approved medications for its treatment. A growing body of research has detailed the important connections between the brain and the resident population of bacteria in the gut, the gut microbiome in psychiatric disease models. Acute depletion of gut bacteria results in enhanced reward in a mouse cocaine place preference model, and repletion of bacterially-derived short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) metabolites reverses this effect. However, the role of the gut microbiome and its metabolites in modulating cocaine-seeking behavior after prolonged abstinence is unknown. Given that relapse prevention is the most clinically challenging issue in treating substance use disorders, studies examining the effects of microbiome manipulations in relapse-relevant models are critical. Here, Sprague-Dawley rats received either untreated water or antibiotics to deplete the gut microbiome and its metabolites. Rats were trained to self-administer cocaine and subjected to either within-session threshold testing to evaluate motivation for cocaine or 21 days of abstinence followed by a cue-induced cocaine-seeking task to model relapse behavior. Microbiome depletion did not affect cocaine acquisition on an FR1 schedule. However, microbiome-depleted subjects exhibited significantly enhanced motivation for low dose cocaine on a within-session threshold task. Similarly, microbiome depletion increased cue-induced cocaine-seeking following prolonged abstinence. In the absence of a normal microbiome, repletion of bacterially-derived SCFA metabolites reversed the behavioral and transcriptional changes associated with microbiome depletion. These findings suggest that gut bacteria, via their metabolites, are key regulators of drug-seeking behaviors, positioning the microbiome as a potential translational research target.
Project description:Recent evidence suggests an important role of the gut microbiome in early life on immune cell entraining. Using two independent transgenic (Tg) lines of Alzheimer’s disease, we have demonstrated that life-long antibiotic (ABX)-perturbation of the gut microbiome is associated with reduced amyloid beta (Ab) plaque pathology and microglial phenotypes in male mice. Furthermore, fecal microbiota transfer (FMT) from age-matched APPPS1-21 Tg mice into long-term ABX-treated male APPPS1-21 mice partially restored amyloidosis and microgliosis, thus establishing causality. in the current studies, we planned to investigate the transcriptome profiles in APPPS1-21 mice treated with short-term abx (PND14-21) compared with vehicle treated groups in genotype-, sex- and time -dependent manner. Most importantly, we also investigated if fecal microbiota transplants from age-matched Tg male mice into short-term abx (PND14-21)-treated male mice restores brain transcriptomes to that of obsreved in vehicle-treated male mice at 9 weeks of age.