The gut microbiome from patients with schizophrenia modulates the glutamate-glutamine-GABA cycle and schizophrenia-relevant behaviors in mice
By Peng Zheng, B. Zeng, Meiling Liu, Jian-jun Chen, J. Pan, Yu Han, Yiyun Liu, Ke Cheng, Chanjuan Zhou, Haiyang Wang and 7 more. Science Advances, 2019
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New findings suggest that schizophrenia may be linked to gut bacteria. Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a devastating mental disorder with poorly defined underlying molecular mechanisms. The gut microbiome can modulate brain function and behaviors through the microbiota-gut-brain axis. Here, we found that unmedicated and medicated patients with SCZ had a decreased microbiome α-diversity index and marked disturbances of gut microbial composition versus healthy controls (HCs). Several unique bacterial taxa (e.g., Veillonellaceae and Lachnospiraceae) were associated with SCZ severity. A specific microbial panel (Aerococcaceae, Bifidobacteriaceae, Brucellaceae, Pasteurellaceae, and Rikenellaceae) enabled discriminating patients with SCZ from HCs with 0.769 area under the curve. Compared to HCs, germ-free mice receiving SCZ microbiome fecal transplants had lower glutamate and higher glutamine and GABA in the hippocampus and displayed SCZ-relevant behaviors similar to other mouse models of SCZ involving glutamatergic hypofunction. Together, our findings suggest that the SCZ microbiome itself can alter neurochemistry and neurologic function in ways that may be relevant to SCZ pathology.
Subfields: Biological Psychiatry, Molecular Biology, Physiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b4f790f3ab6454a122876ae2813f117aae26eab
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Citations in the corpus
- The Gut-Brain Axis: How Microbiota and Host Inflammasome Influence Brain Physiology and Pathology (2020, background): “Patients affected by schizophrenia have also an altered and less rich gut microbiota composition with 77 differently expressed operational taxonomy units (OTUs) compared to healthy individuals (23).”
- Factors affecting the composition of the gut microbiota, and its modulation (2019, background): “, 2015), and affecting the behavioral and neurological functions of the host (Buffington et al., 2016; Wahlström et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2019).”
- Human gut microbiota/microbiome in health and diseases: a review (2020, background): “2015a, b), influencing brain–gut communication and thus affecting the mental and neurological functions of the host (Zheng et al. 2019), hence, the gut microbiota plays a significant role in maintaining normal gut physiology and health.”