Remote control: How do microbiota promote animal health?

越来越多的人正在忍受肥胖等代谢疾病，而老年人的健康状况普遍不佳。如果我们能同时保护健康的老龄化和健康的新陈代谢呢？我们的肠道细菌调节衰老和新陈代谢。作为协助宿主不能单独执行的许多功能的天然伙伴，这些微生物是新疗法的有希望的来源。没有细菌的动物寿命更长，但肥胖。因此，我们面临的挑战是了解细菌如何调节衰老和新陈代谢，并通过这两种方法分离出可用于促进长期健康的机制。一个主要问题是了解生活在肠道中的细菌如何对其他宿主组织产生广泛影响。该项目将使用苍蝇来研究动物之间发生的过程来解决这个问题。我们将研究特定的细菌基因如何调节苍蝇中激素和营养物质的水平，这些变化对组织很重要，以及对寿命和新陈代谢的影响。通过这样做，我们将评估微生物群如何调节宿主健康，以及我们是否可以精确地操纵它们来广泛改善健康。

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.