The Human Microbiome and Gut Microbiome and Obesity

In recent year, obesity has becomes conspicuous chronic disease because it increased dramatically in the world. As stated by Bäckhed: “Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally, with more than 1 billion adults overweight and at least 300 million if them clinically obese.” (2010). The genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors are important causes in the development of obesity but one of the most important environmental factor to obesity is the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome plays a key role in obesity in which the gut microbiome regulate host metabolic inflammation, and certain type and amount of gut microbiome in human are directly relate to obesity.

The human gut contains a huge diversity of bacteria and the microbiota, which is crucially important for maintaining human health. According to Greiner et al, the gut microbiome plays an important role as a regulator to modulate human’s metabolism when there is a change in the environment. It is because that the gut microbiome is composed of many different bacterial species, and thus it is a multicellular organ with a metabolic function (2011). Despite the huge diversity of the gut microbiome, there are only three groups of bacteria are dominated in human gut microbiome, which include Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, and Actinobacteria (Greiner et al 2011).

The alternation of gut microbiome’s community is associated with developing obesity. Based on Turnbaugh et al, the metagenomic study showed that certain of the gut microbiome can cause developing obesity. It is because when compared with lean mice, obese mice have genes that increase glucose absorption from the gut and stimulate the liver to create fat, which are encoded with the catabolism of detailed polysaccharide...

... middle of paper ...

...” Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism 22 (4)

Heilbronn, Leonie K., and Campbell, Lesley V.. “Adipose tissue macrophages, low grade inflammation and insulin resistance in human obesity.” Curr Pharm Des 2008, 14:1225-1230.

Turnbaugh, P. J., Backhed, F., Fulton, L., & Gordon, J. I.. “Diet-induced obesity is linked to marked but reversible alterations in the mouse distal gut microbiome.” Cell Host and Microbe (2008). 3, 213–223.

Turnbaugh, P. J., Ley, R. E., Mahowald, M. A., Magrini, V., Mardis, E. R., & Gordon, J. I.. “An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest.” Nature (2006). 444, 1027–1031.

Zhang H, DiBaise JK, Zuccolo A, Kudrna D, Braidotti M, Yu Y, Parameswaran P, Crowell MD, Wing R, Rittmann BE, Krajmalnik-Brown R.. “Human gut microbiota in obesity and after gastric bypass.” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2009, 106:2365-2370.