Sally Cudmore, General Manager at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) Microbiome Institute in Cork, outlines the key pillars of work undertaken at the Institute and unveils research underway in the area of foodborne pathogens
At the heart of the APC Microbiome* Institute is a spirit of real collaboration and shared knowledge. Founded in 2003, the Institute brings over 270 clinicians, clinician-scientists and basic scientists together to work with industry in a proactive and trans-disciplinary fashion.
As Sally explains: “One of our big remits is to work with industry, and to collaborate with the food, farming and biotechnology sectors. Our research is on the microbial community, which live on and inside us: we each have more microbial cells than human cells! The real area of focus is on those microbial cells that live in our gut – bacteria, parasites, yeasts, etc. We are interested in understanding how this community affects our overall health balance and how this interplay works.”
Sally notes that in an era of growing antibiotic resistance there is a real interest in developing new antibiotics that are harnessed in the gut, as well as developing new prebiotics. This area of prebiotics is a big focus for food companies looking to develop functional foods for their portfolios. Another key pillar of the work undertaken by the Institute is the interaction between diet, the microbiota and health at the extremes of life, i.e. in infants and older people (gut microbiota is the name given to the microbe population living in our intestine). “Nutrition for infants and microbial exposure in children during their first six months is of huge importance. Also, for those in the later stages of life, past the age of 65, the diversity of the microbial community starts to collapse, and this has a knock-on affect on health. We want to try to develop a combination of palatable food ingredients, for example, that would combat this and promote better health in the gut.”
What Sally refers to as the ‘brain-gut-microbe axis’ is also a major theme. “Everyone will be familiar with the expressions such as ‘sick with fear’ or ‘butterflies in your tummy’. There is a three-way communication between the brain, gut and microbiota.” The Institute works towards a better understanding of the role of this axis in the stress response, and its links with other debilitating conditions, such as anxiety, stress, depression, autism spectrum disorders, obesity and irritable bowl syndrome.
The final programme Sally highlights is host-microbe dialogue. “This examines how human bacteria and the human host communicate with each other: what is the signalling going on? If we try to understand this signalling it may help with tackling disease.”
An interesting project currently underway looks at why everyone who eats the same batch of contaminated food does not become ill. “One possible answer,” Sally says, “is that a robust and diverse microbiome may protect some individuals against infection, with Salmonella or Listeria for example.” The APC scientists have actually shown this to be the case in some infections and are working to identify the individual bacteria and bacterial products involved in this protection. “In the future we may well be able to design diets, or develop probiotics, which will protect humans from many of the infectious diseases associated with foodborne pathogens. This might be particularly important in developing countries, where it is difficult to maintain high production standards and where good hygiene practices may not be in place.”
*Microbiome refers to the collection of genomes of microbes in a system.
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