Gut-mediated metabolomics and risk of chronic disease
The overarching theme of my research has been to examine gut mediated metabolomics and the metabolomics of chronic disease. My previous research has primarily spanned both animal models in cancer and risk of insulin resistance to human clinical trials geared towards lipidomics and glucose homeostasis. My current interests lie in understanding the responses of the gut microbiota to foods that may stimulate changes in the metagenomics of the gut microbiome and the metabolomic alterations of phytonutrients contained within those foods.
For the Soils to Society program, I will be spearheading the Nutrition and Gut Microbiome Lab’s examination of quinoa and other foods in an in vitro model of the gut microbiota. These efforts will shed light on the potential for different cultivars of quinoa and other foods to influence the functional metagenomics of the gut microbiota that have implications for human health. Ultimately our work will lay the foundation for future clinical trials in which we will seek to validate the potential health benefits of foods by linking those foods to alterations in the gut microbiota, production of gut-mediated metabolites, and ultimately clinical outcomes related to risk of chronic disease.
The gut microbiota produces key metabolites that have the ability to affect host health. Undigested polysaccharides can be converted to short chain fatty acids which are known to mitigate inflammation. Host-secreted bile acids are deconjugated by the gut microbiota and metabolized into secondary bile acids in the colon. Bile acids have recently been revealed as key nutrient signals that interact with nuclear receptors that stimulate transcription and translation of genes involved in lipid synthesis, glucose homeostasis, and their own metabolism. Synthesized from cholesterol, bile acids comprise a diverse range of chemical compositions that vary widely in their ability to interact with nuclear receptors depending largely on their lipophilicity. Thus the interaction of the gut microbiota through its metagenome provide fertile ground for studying the relationship between foods, the gut microbiota, and host metabolism.
The Nutrition and Gut Microbiome Lab will utilize high-throughput metagenomic technology to answer questions about the role that quinoa and other foods will play in altering the genetics of the gut microbiota that may play a role in producing gut-derived metabolites like bile acids and short chain fatty acids. However, foods also provide exogenous phytonutrients that are metabolized by the gut microbiome and which may affect host health as antioxidants and as functional modifiers of endogenous protein function. One of the directions for our research is to understand the role of processing foods that may make phytonutrients more or less bioavailable to the host and how that processing and those metabolites might be altered both by the process and by the microbiome.