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0:00
Hello, everyone. I
am Sean Gibbons,
an associate professor at
the Institute for Systems
Biology in Seattle,
and today, I'm going to talk
about some of our recent work
in microbial community-scale
metabolic modeling
and precision nutrition.
0:17
As background to this work,
I'll talk a little bit
about the human microbiome.
You may or may not know that
we are mostly microbial,
that a slight majority of
the cells in our
bodies are microbial.
But we're about 50%;
we're about on par.
However, the genetic
capacity of our bodies is
vastly weighted
towards the microbes.
There are something 4-6
million unique genes
in the microbiome, and
only about 23000 genes
in the human genome.
So there's a huge amount
of genetic capacity
pent up in this ecosystem of
organisms that inhabit our bodies,
bacteria, archaea,
fungi, and viruses.
It's part of what
makes us unique.
It's part of how we respond to
environmental stimuli
to diet, to drugs.
Some of that variation
in how we respond,
yes, is due, in
part, to our genome,
but also to the activity
of our microbiota.
For example, identical twins,
who share the exact same genome,
have completely
distinct microbiomes
even as distinct as two
strangers, practically.
For all of us, this is the part
of our bodies that makes us
unique and drives unique
responses to the environment.
1:28
We've known for many years that
the microbiome affects
our phenotypic responses.
There's a classic paper,
Turnbaugh et al.
from back in 2006,
where they essentially
took feces from
lean individuals and
overweight individuals,
and they transplanted these
feces into germ-free mice,
different sets of
these germ-free mice.
So some got the lean microbiota.
Some got the obese microbiota.
And they fed these mice
the exact same diet,
and the mice that had
the transplant from
the obese individuals
gained more weight,
and you can see the
picture of the two mice
here on the right-hand side.
It's been difficult to translate
this knowledge into therapeutics
because we haven't quite
known mechanistically
what's going on.
We know that there's an effect,
but how and why this effect
is happening is less clear.
