AIMBE
Disturbances to the gut microbiome contribute to health conditions like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). To better understand how those microbes interact with each other and their environment, scientists from the University of California, San Diego have developed a new tool called coralME that creates detailed genome-scale computational models of metabolism and gene and protein expression. Full details are provided in a new Cell Systems paper titled “Metabolism and gene expression models for the microbiome reveal how diet and metabolic dysbiosis impact disease.”
According to the developers, the so-called ME-models link a microbe’s genome to its phenotype and attributes. They highlight how microbes respond to certain nutrients such as which will increase the prevalence of a particular population and contribute to an imbalance in the microbiome. The models could also predict which nutrients are most favorable to microbe populations that are beneficial to the gut as well as which lead to the formation of undesired products such as allergens or toxins… Continue reading.
