With a little help from my friends

Abstract

Based on the anthropocentric view of ourselves, we though that this average human body is alone in its existence in its average lifetime. We also thought that all good or bad living conditions are only due to the genes in our human cells. Recently, there is rapidly increasing evidence about the beneficial relationship our body has with its gut microbiome. The main role of this relationship is to stay healthy and fit. This gut microbiota with 150 times more genes than the genes in the human genome is considered to be the essential organ. With this tremendous gene potential microbiota affect both health and disease via several mechanisms: (1) they have potential to benefit energy taken from the food, increase the level of nutrient harvest and involve into appetite signaling; (2) they work as a physical barrier that protects from pathogen invasion via competition and antimicrobial substrate production; (3) they are essential in the process of intestinal mucosa production and stimulate normal development of humoral and cellular mucosal immune system. The main characteristic of gut microbiota is their taxonomic and functional diversity, as well as normal variations influenced by age, genetics, environment and diet. But if we state that normal microbiota is a stable balanced group of microorganisms that invade the gut, then what are the limits of resistance of this balance and stability under different amount of stress and perturbation towards dysbiosis? And what are the mechanisms that enable resilience to dietary changes, administration of antibiotics or new species invasion? For example why one person may eat poisoned food and remain healthy while another may become seriously ill? Dysbiosis of gut microbiota is a major ethiopatho-genesis of various immune, infectious, metabolic and cancerous disorders, also is a determinator of many physiological states such as: cardiac size, hepatic gene expression, central nervous system function and behavioral patterns. Understanding the role human microbiome has on variety of serious diseases and conditions may help structuring future personalized medicine based on human microbiome modulation in prevention and treatment. Important efforts from many scientists from the field of microbiology, biology, bioinformatics, statistics, molecular medicine, epidemiology, physics is essential for crucial accomplishment in this complex field of microbiome world.