Predicting structure of microbial communities key to our health: Study

Bengaluru: A group of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) researchers has developed a new method to efficiently predict the compositions of microbial communities in our bodies. The study, led by Narendra Dixit in the department of chemical engineering and the centre for biosystems science and engineering, was performed in collaboration with Unilever R&D in Bengaluru.

Pointing out that our body is home to a large number of microbes on which our health depends, IISc said in a statement that disruption of the microbial communities in our gut — also called the gut microbiome — which can happen with the use of antibiotics, affects not only our digestion but also our mental health.

Consequently, the study published in the journal ‘Nature Computational Science’ says enormous efforts are ongoing to unravel the principles governing the sustenance and functioning of microbiomes and to devise strategies to prevent their disruption and/ or engineer their restoration.

Such efforts have also revealed the many advantages that communities have over isolated individual species and triggered a keen interest in designing synthetic microbial communities for applications in biotechnology and healthcare. “It is important, therefore, to understand how microbial communities survive, and devise ways of restoring them if they are perturbed. More recently, recognising their (microbial community) power, artificial microbial communities are being assembled for numerous applications,” the researchers say.

However, a major challenge in such prediction has been the large number of interactions between the microbes present, which determine the compositions of microbial communities but remain difficult to unravel. “In the new method, the researchers developed a way to subsume a majority of the interactions into a few, effective interactions, which were easy to unravel and, at the same time, facilitated accurate prediction of community compositions,” IISc said in a statement.