The collective community of microorganisms that reside in the human gut, known as the gut microbiota, has a profound influence on human health. Disruption of the gut microbiota homeostasis is a feature of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s. The species composition of the gut microbiota and microbiota-derived metabolites are altered in PD patients. However, which bacterial species or metabolites directly contribute to PD remains unknown. A better and mechanistic understanding of host-microbial interactions and the effect of single-species of the gut microbiota, together with studying causal elements (bacterial species and metabolites) is then of utmost importance to promote personalized microbiota-based therapies against PD. In this project called “Worm-Microbiomics”, we aim to develop a fast and high-throughput scalable testing platform to systematically study the gut microbiota and its metabolites at single-species resolution, in worms. In the first phase funded by ParkinsonNL, we will study how 10 selected bacterial species misbalanced in PD patients may contribute to disease development. This research will be performed in collaboration with Prof. van Laar (Department of Neurology, UMCG) and Prof. Harmsen (Functional Microbiota group of Medical Microbiology, UMCG) and will exploit the unique microbiota-Biobank from the Lifelines cohort study (UMCG).
More information can be found here (in Dutch):
