The Role of Dietary D-serine in Health and Disease

我们的饮食对健康的重要性是众所周知的，但很难正确评估。许多所谓的“健康食品”、“超级食品”和“益生菌”提出了大胆的主张，但严格评估它们的效果是具有挑战性的，特别是对人类和其他动物这样的复杂系统。如果我们能够了解饮食的特定成分如何影响我们被食物中毒细菌感染的机会，那么我们就可以做出正确的饮食决定或定制我们的食物，以提供对感染的内在抵抗力。我们工作的目的是了解一种特定的D-氨基酸(D-AA)如何影响胃肠道感染的易感性和康复。在L-氨基酸是蛋白质的基础上，D-氨基酸不能以同样的方式使用，因此在很大程度上被科学家忽视了。然而，我们的工作表明，它们在控制食物中毒细菌使用的关键武器方面发挥着重要作用。这些D-氨基酸存在于许多加工食品中，所以现在应该看看它们是如何影响我们的肠道细菌的，以及它们是如何影响肠道病原体的。我们有了令人兴奋的新结果，表明一种特定的D-氨基酸可以帮助在感染后恢复正常肠道细菌的平衡。我们建议使用一个小鼠模型来研究这一结果背后的机制，该模型允许我们测试宿主饮食、肠道细菌和宿主防御之间在对病原体的抵抗力方面的相互作用。这项工作很重要，因为我们相信它将导致基于饮食的新战略，以对抗一系列急性和慢性胃肠道感染。

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.