Publication – How bacteria talk to keep us healthy

Outline the paper

A humungous amount of bacteria live inside our gut, and they talk and interact with each other to keep us healthy. We wanted to understand how they do this, so we designed a computer model of bacterial populations inside the human gut. Then, using different methods, we explore the behaviour of gut bacteria to understand how they keep us healthy and what can go wrong.

Do you know, if we count all the human cells and bacterial cells in and on our body, there will be around nine times more bacterial cells than human cells? They are all not bad. In fact, they are vital for our well-being. Especially, the many different bacteria in our gut, also collectively known as Gut Bacteriome, which play a crucial role in food digestion. They talk and interact with each other to produce essential nutrient components for our health. Abnormal Gut Bacteriome compositions lead to altered nutrient component production and metabolic disorders. Consequently, understanding the impact of Gut Bacteriome changes on human health is essential in designing treatments for metabolic diseases. Therefore, we developed a simulator to approximately mimic the Gut Bacteriome and conducted various experiments that explain how what we consume modifies the Gut Bacteriome and how these changes result in altered nutrient production.

Who will it help?

Unhealthy dietary patterns can harm friendly gut bacteria and cause health problems. These health problems are known as metabolic disorders. Well-known examples are type-2 diabetes and obesity. Understanding how what we eat can harm gut bacteria and the consequences of that (which we analysed in this study) helps introduce new types of treatments.

First, we developed a Gut Bacteriome simulator (aka Virtual Gut Bacteriome) which paves the path to conduct experiments on Gut Bacteriome efficiently and safely. According to our findings, obtained through experiments conducted on this Virtual Gut Bacteriome, it is possible to adjust certain nutrition processes that involve bacteria, to fit personal health conditions. In other words, our results can lead to a future where we will be able to create “personalised food/medicines” tailored for each person’s needs and better address any health issues related to their nutrition.

What is the future of this research?

This research can be extended to identify the causes of different disorders. For example, other researchers have found that how bacteria talk and interact can influence the mind, and abnormalities can lead to various phycological conditions. Investigating how we can manipulate bacterial behaviours to address disorders such as Autism and Parkinsons is a part of our plan. Furthermore, we are investigating how bacteria can be used to regulate the metabolic process inside the gut as a therapeutical approach.

In addition, we study the reliability of the bacterial network as it is the foundation for smart drug delivery systems and smart diagnostic systems. We test whether the bacterial network in different health conditions can communicate uninterrupted so that we can use these networks to deliver drugs smartly, even if the person is not healthy. In addition to this, bacteria can tell us a lot about the person’s health conditions as they can sense many things inside our gut. This enables us to use information from bacteria for smart diagnostics, which is one of our future steps.

Our research has multiple industry applications according to the nature of its components. First, the developed “Virtual Gut Bacteriome” (the gut bacteriome simulator) can be utilised as a versatile platform where various bacterial interaction related experiments can be conducted. Bacterial experiments in real-life takes a significant amount of time and effort, but with the “Virtual Gut Bacteriome”, we can expect fast data with more features that is hard to expect from laboratory experiments. Therefore, the “Virtual Gut Bacteriome” is an excellent place to understand the causes of metabolic problems, and it is also a great method to test new drugs.

Imagine a glass of milk or cup of yoghurt that can treat your health problems. With the combination of the “Virtual Gut Bacteriome” and the model we presented in this paper, we can identify what should be in that glass of milk or cup of yoghurt. This has been an emerging topic in the food industry for several years, and our research can help this idea make it more feasible.

Publication Title: A Graph-based Molecular Communications Model Analysis of the Human Gut Bacteriome
Authors: Samitha Sulakshana Somathilaka; Daniel Perez Martins; Wiley Barton; Orla O’Sullivan; Paul Cotter; Sasitharan Balasubramaniam 
Publication Date: 04 February 2022
Journal: IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Link to publication: doi.org/10.1109/JBHI.2022.3148672