In a study published in the journal Trends in Microbiology on October 11 entitled “Decoding the microbiome: advances in genetic manipulation for gut bacteria”, Professor Chao Yanjie’s group at the Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIII-CAS), and Professor Ma Yanlei’s group at Fudan University reviewed the latest advances and challenges in genetic manipulation for gut bacteria, as well as the value and prospects for the application of engineered bacteria against human diseases.

Specific bacterial species or communities are closely related to human health, and play important roles in the human immune system, metabolic diseases, and pathogen infections. However, having limited genetic manipulation (GM) tools for gut bacteria hinders the understanding of the causal relationships and molecular mechanisms between gut bacteria and diseases.

Generic, efficient and practical genetic manipulation techniques are crucial to “tame” the microbiome, allowing us to not only better understand the host-microbiome interactions but also to accelerate microbiome engineering for novel therapeutics.

The researchers comprehensively reviewed the current advances and challenges in developing genetic manipulation approaches for gut microbiome, including the clustered and regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas-based and transposase-based systems in both model and non-model gut bacteria.

Finally, the researchers provide perspectives on the future development of GM for gut microbiome species, suggesting that more effort should be placed on assembling a generalized GM pipeline to accelerate the application of groundbreaking GM tools in non-model gut bacteria so as to move towards both basic understanding and clinical translation.

Genetic manipulation and genome-editing strategies for human gut bacteria [IMAGE: SIII-CAS]

For more information, please contact:

Chao Yanjie

E-mail: yjchao@siii.cas.cn

Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection,

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Source: Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection,

Chinese Academy of Sciences