Exposure to a Social Stressor Alters the Structure of the Intestinal Microbiota: Implications for Stressor-Induced Immunomodulation
By M. Bailey, Scot E. Dowd, J. Galley, Amy R. Hufnagle, Rebecca G. Allen, M. Lyte. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 2010
1,082 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The bodies of most animals are populated by highly complex and genetically diverse communities of microorganisms. The majority of these microbes reside within the intestines in largely stable but dynamically interactive climax communities that positively interact with their host. Studies from this laboratory have shown that stressor exposure impacts the stability of the microbiota and leads to bacterial translocation. The biological importance of these alterations, however, is not well understood. To determine whether the microbiome contributes to stressor-induced immunoenhancement, mice were exposed to a social stressor called social disruption (SDR), that increases circulating cytokines and primes the innate immune system for enhanced reactivity. Bacterial populations in the cecum were characterized using bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing. Stressor exposure significantly changed the community structure of the microbiota, particularly when the microbiota were assessed immediately after stressor exposure. Most notably, stressor exposure decreased the relative abundance of bacteria in the genus Bacteroides, while increasing the relative abundance of bacteria in the genus Clostridium. The stressor also increased circulating levels of IL-6 and MCP-1, which were significantly correlated with stressor-induced changes to three bacterial genera (i.e., Coprococcus, Pseudobutyrivibrio, and Dorea). In follow up experiments, mice were treated with an antibiotic cocktail to determine whether reducing the microbiota would abrogate the stressor-induced increases in circulating cytokines. Exposure to SDR failed to increase IL-6 and MCP-1 in the antibiotic treated mice. These data show that exposure to SDR significantly affects bacterial populations in the intestines, and remarkably also suggest that the microbiota are necessary for stressor-induced increases in circulating cytokines.
Subfields: Biological Psychiatry, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71237d56a7cea12d0acffdb3f96231054bb5a146
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Citations in the corpus
- Brain-gut interactions in inflammatory bowel disease. (2013, background): “Exposure of mice to a social stressor affects the structure of the intestinal microbiota and increases the circulating level of cytokines; antibiotics abrogate the stressor-induced increases in circulating cytokines (59).”
- The role of microbiome in central nervous system disorders (2013, positive): “Bailey et al. (2011) indicated that a social disruption (SDR) initiated by co-housing with aggressive male littermates altered murine gut bacterial populations through immune-activation.”
- The Central Nervous System and the Gut Microbiome (2016, background): “Mounting evidence suggests that the communication between the brain and gut microbial populations is bi-directional (Bailey et al., 2011; Carabotti et al., 2015; Moussaoui et al., 2014; Park et al., 2013).”
- Stress & the gut-brain axis: Regulation by the microbiome (2017, background): “exposure early in life or in adulthood can change t he organism’s microbiota composition, and that microbial populations can shape an organism’s tress responsiveness [6, 7, 10, 39-41].”
- What is the Healthy Gut Microbiota Composition? A Changing Ecosystem across Age, Environment, Diet, and Diseases (2019, background): “A model of social disruption among adult mice [111] demonstrated that exposure to stress results in substantial changes in gut microbiota composition: a decrease in Bacteroides spp.”
- Gut microbiota depletion from early adolescence in mice: Implications for brain and behaviour. (2015, background): “Changes in the relative abundance of Bacteroidetes have been previously reported in response to chronic psychosocial stress exposure in mice (Bailey et al., 2011) and exposure to as little as 2 h of a social stressor is sufficient to significantly affect other populations of the colonic microbiota (”
- Short‐chain fatty acids: microbial metabolites that alleviate stress‐induced brain–gut axis alterations (2018, background): “For instance, preclinical studies have revealed that chronic stress results in an altered gut microbial composition (Bailey et al., 2011; Bharwani et al., 2017; Burokas et al., 2017; Galley et al., 2017; Marin et al., 2017; Szyszkowicz et al., 2017; Dunphy-Doherty et al., 2018).”
- Transferring the blues: Depression-associated gut microbiota induces neurobehavioural changes in the rat. (2016, background): “, 2013), such as low-grade immune activation (Bailey et al., 2011), hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) activity (Sudo et al.”
- Altered fecal microbiota composition in patients with major depressive disorder. (2015, background): “Bailey et al. (2011) observed that social stressors significantly altered the relative abundance of bacteria, particularly when microbiota were assessed immediately following stressor exposure.”
- Psychoneuroimmunology Meets Neuropsychopharmacology: Translational Implications of the Impact of Inflammation on Behavior (2012, background): “Interestingly, in the context of stress, bacteria have been shown to translocate from the gut to lymphoid organs in laboratory mice (Bailey et al, 2006), and treatment of mice with a cocktail of antibiotics was found to both reduce intestinal microflora while eliminating the capacity of a social dis”