The Host Shapes the Gut Microbiota via Fecal microRNA

By Shirong Liu, A. P. da Cunha, R. Rezende, R. Cialic, Zhiyun Wei, L. Bry, L. Comstock, R. Gandhi, Howard L. Weiner. Cell Host and Microbe, 2016

721 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY The host gut microbiota varies across species and individuals but is relatively stable over time within an individual. How the host selectively shapes the microbiota is largely unclear. Here, we show that fecal microRNA (miRNA)-mediated inter-species gene regulation facilitates host control of the gut microbiota. MiRNAs are abundant in mouse and human fecal samples and present within extracellular vesicles. Cell-specific loss of the miRNA-processing enzyme, Dicer, identified intestinal epithelial cells (IEC) and Hopx-positive cells as predominant fecal miRNA sources. These miRNAs can enter bacteria, such as F. nucleatum and E. coli, specifically regulate bacterial gene transcripts and affect bacterial growth. IEC-miRNA deficient (Dicer1ΔIEC) mice exhibit uncontrolled gut microbiota and exacerbated colitis and WT fecal miRNA transplantation restores fecal microbes and ameliorates colitis. These findings identify both a physiologic role by which fecal miRNA shapes the gut microbiota and a potential strategy for manipulating the microbiome.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cad213f4b49d10ea2b0064dcd38f2e3dba4a9c47

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Citations in the corpus

• Factors affecting the composition of the gut microbiota, and its modulation (2019, background): “It indicates that there are specific mechanisms used by the host to shape its own gastrointestinal microbiota and maintain its homeostasis (Liu et al., 2016; Rawls et al., 2006).”
• Plant-derived exosomal microRNAs shape the gut microbiota (2018, background): “Therefore, it is conceivable that unlike endogenous miRNA released from host intestinal epithelial cells (Liu et al., 2016), which release a limited number of miRNAs, a large number and variety of food-derived ELN miRNAs can be taken up by gut microbiota.”
• miRNet - dissecting miRNA-target interactions and functional associations through network-based visual analysis (2016, background): “More recently, it has been shown that miRNAs may play important roles in host–parasite interactions (3), host-gut microbiota interactions (4) as well as in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (5).”