The Role of Dietary D-serine in Health and Disease

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The importance of our diet on health is well established yet hard to properly assess. Many so called "health foods", "super foods" and "probiotics" make bold claims but rigorously evaluating their effects is challenging, especially for complex systems like humans and other animals. If we can understand how specific components of our diet affect our chances of being infected by food poisoning bugs then we can make good dietary decisions or tailor our food to provide an inherent resistance to infection. The aim of our work is to understand how a specific D-amino acid (D-AA) affects susceptibility to, and recovery from, gastrointestinal infections. Wheres L-amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, D-amino acids can't be used in the same way so have largely been ignored by scientists. However, our work has shown that they play an important role in controlling the key weapons used by food poisoning bacteria. These D-amino acids are present is many processed food so it is now appropriate to look at how they affect our gut bacteria and how they affect gut pathogens.We have exciting new results showing that one specific D-amino acid can help restore the balance of the normal gut bacteria following infection. We propose to investigate the mechanism underlying this result using a mouse model that allows us to test the interplay between the host diet, gut bacteria and host defences in the resistance to pathogens. The work is important because we believe it will lead to new dietary-based strategies to combat a range of gastrointestinal infections, both acute and chronic.