How colonization by microbiota in early life shapes the immune system

By Thomas Gensollen, S. Iyer, Dennis L. Kasper, R. Blumberg. Science, 2016

1,757 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microbial colonization of mucosal tissues during infancy plays an instrumental role in the development and education of the host mammalian immune system. These early-life events can have long-standing consequences: facilitating tolerance to environmental exposures or contributing to the development of disease in later life, including inflammatory bowel disease, allergy, and asthma. Recent studies have begun to define a critical period during early development in which disruption of optimal host-commensal interactions can lead to persistent and in some cases irreversible defects in the development and training of specific immune subsets. Here, we discuss the role of early-life education of the immune system during this “window of opportunity,” when microbial colonization has a potentially critical impact on human health and disease.

Subfields: Immunology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce8c512d6274fd1fd01fb19ed4d009bfbb6d5f1a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Immunology

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Homeostatic immunity and the microbiota (2017, positive): “In further support for a role in these cells in setting the stage for host-microbiota interactions, non-classical lymphocytes have been shown to be enriched at barrier sites during early life (Gensollen et al., 2016), a time of extraordinary and dynamic exposure to the microbiota.”
Stereotypic Immune System Development in Newborn Children (2018, background): “Much like other sensory systems, the immune system is dependent on sensory inputs during its development, and germ-free mice have severe immune system defects (Gensollen et al., 2016).”
Intestinal Barrier Dysfunction, LPS Translocation, and Disease Development (2020, background): “Under normal conditions, gut microbiota offer many benefits to the host, such as harvesting energy [4], protecting against pathogens [5], and regulating host immunity [6].”
The First Microbial Colonizers of the Human Gut: Composition, Activities, and Health Implications of the Infant Gut Microbiota (2017, background): “This cross talk is facilitated by host-microbial interactions during the earliest days of life or even through microbial colonization during pregnancy, suggesting that disease risk is programmed during early life, including the prenatal period (273).”
Interaction between microbiota and immunity in health and disease (2020, background): “THE ROLE OF THE MICROBIOME IN IMMUNE SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT Early-life colonization of the mammalian host’s mucosal surfaces plays a pivotal role in maturation of the host’s immune system.(17) Most critical events in education of host immunity may take place during the first years of life, in which micr”
Wild Mouse Gut Microbiota Promotes Host Fitness and Improves Disease Resistance (2017, positive): “This approach allowed vertical microbiome transfer to newborn pups enabling microbiota-mediated effects on the pups’ immune systems before and after birth (Gensollen et al., 2016; Gomez de Agüero et al., 2016).”
Tryptophan Metabolism: A Link Between the Gut Microbiota and Brain. (2019, background): “It is well known that through the bidirectional crosstalk between the microbiota and immune system, microbial colonization plays an instrumental role in the development of the intestinal immune response of the host (50).”
The gut microbiome: Relationships with disease and opportunities for therapy (2018, background): “Thus, the early-life gut microbiome has formed the focus of intense research (Chung et al., 2012; Schnupf et al., 2015; Gensollen et al., 2016; Ferretti et al., 2018; Pan et al., 2018).”