Remote control: How do microbiota promote animal health?

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Ever more people are enduring metabolic diseases like obesity, whilst older people are living in generally poor health. What if we could safeguard both healthy ageing and healthy metabolism?Our gut bacteria regulate ageing and metabolism. As natural partners that assist with many functions that hosts can't perform alone, these microbes are a promising source of new therapies. Animals reared without bacteria live longer, but are obese. The challenge is therefore to understand how bacteria regulate both ageing and metabolism, and isolate just the mechanisms that can be used to promote long-term health by both measures.A major issue is understanding how bacteria that live in the gut have widespread effects across other host tissues. This project will address this problem using flies to study processes that occur across animals. We will look at how specific bacterial genes regulate levels of hormones and nutrients in the fly, the tissues where those changes are important, and consequences for lifespan and metabolism. By doing this, we will evaluate how microbiota regulate host health, and whether we can precisely manipulate them to broadly improve health.