Diet-Microbe-Host Interactions: From Molecules to Medicine
** Lecture will be given in English**
Abstract:
What we eat shapes who we are, not just through calories and nutrients, but through the trillions of microorganisms that inhabit our gut. The intestinal microbiome acts as a metabolic intermediary, transforming dietary inputs into a diverse repertoire of bioactive compounds that profoundly influence host physiology. Specific dietary components can be leveraged, or inadvertently exploited, to reprogram gut microbial activity and, consequently, alter host phenotype in health and disease.
Work from our lab provided mechanistic evidence demonstrating that sulfur amino acid intake drives the production of gut-derived uremic toxins, establishing a diet–microbiome axis as a causal driver of chronic kidney disease progression (Lobel et al., Science, 2020). Building on this framework, ongoing studies in our lab examine how dietary fiber reshapes microbial metabolic activity in both mouse models and human cohorts, and how dietary nitrate engages distinct microbial enzymatic pathways to exert systemic effects in mice.
A final, striking clinical observation brings these themes into oncology: consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with altered responses to immune checkpoint immunotherapy in melanoma patients, raising the possibility that diet, acting through the microbiome, can determine whether a patient responds to cancer treatment.
Together, these findings argue that diet is not merely a lifestyle variable but a tractable biological lever for modulating microbiome function and, through it, a surprisingly broad range of host outcomes, from metabolic disease to cancer immunology.
