The role of mucosal-associated microbiome in the resolution of inflammation in inflammatory bowel disease.

炎症性肠病（IBD）是影响胃肠道的慢性免疫介导疾病。它们非常普遍，到2025年全球流行率将接近2000万至3000万人。肠道菌群是IBD发展的关键因素，现在有几种方法旨在控制肠道菌群作为治疗方法，包括粪便移植，益生菌和使用孢子技术选择性扩大有益菌群。然而，我们没有精密医学工具来完善我们对复杂肠道微生物组及其与IBD疾病活动的相互联系的理解，以改进我们选择和定制基于微生物的治疗方法。新出现的证据表明，炎症可能始于口腔，并随着病原体在这些身体部位之间的移动而扩散到肠道，因此有必要研究IBD的口腔-肠道微生物群轴。Robert与具有生物信息学，临床和IBD专业知识的PI一起，旨在表征宏基因组，以确定是否可以根据口腔微生物组数据改进和减少肠道微生物组的复杂性，从而允许在最广泛的IBD环境中进行简单，快速和更可接受的微生物组分析形式。他们将共同使用菌株水平的宏基因组学来研究IBD中口腔和肠道微生物群之间的相互作用，并使用功能宏基因组学来研究与疾病进展/结果的功能相关性。

Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) are chronic immune-mediated conditions affecting the gastrointestinal tract. They are very common, with a global prevalence approaching 20-30 million individuals by 2025. The gut microbiome is a critical factor in the development of IBD and there are now several approaches that are aimed at manipulating the gut flora as therapy including faecal transplantation, probiotics and selective expansion of beneficial bacteria populations using spore technologies. However, we do not have the Precision Medicine tools to refine our understanding of the complex gut microbiome and its inter-connection with IBD disease activity, to improve the way we choose and tailor microbial-based treatments. Emerging evidence suggests that inflammation may begin in the oral cavity and spread to the gut as pathobionts move between those body sites, hence there is a need to investigate the oral-gut microbiome axis in IBD.Robert, alongside PI's with bioinformatics, clinical and IBD expertise, aims to characterise the metagenome to determine if the complexities of the gut microbiome can be refined and reduced based on oral microbiome data, to allow for a simple, quicker and more acceptable form of microbiome analysis that can be carried out in the widest IBD setting. Together, they will use strain-level metagenomics to look at the cross-talk between the oral and gut microbiota in IBD, and functional metagenomics to look at functional correlates with disease progression/outcome.