The effects of antibiotics on the microbiome throughout development and alternative approaches for therapeutic modulation

By A. Langdon, Nathan Crook, Gautam Dantas. Genome Medicine, 2016

824 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The widespread use of antibiotics in the past 80 years has saved millions of human lives, facilitated technological progress and killed incalculable numbers of microbes, both pathogenic and commensal. Human-associated microbes perform an array of important functions, and we are now just beginning to understand the ways in which antibiotics have reshaped their ecology and the functional consequences of these changes. Mounting evidence shows that antibiotics influence the function of the immune system, our ability to resist infection, and our capacity for processing food. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to revisit how we use antibiotics. This review summarizes current research on the short-term and long-term consequences of antibiotic use on the human microbiome, from early life to adulthood, and its effect on diseases such as malnutrition, obesity, diabetes, and Clostridium difficile infection. Motivated by the consequences of inappropriate antibiotic use, we explore recent progress in the development of antivirulence approaches for resisting infection while minimizing resistance to therapy. We close the article by discussing probiotics and fecal microbiota transplants, which promise to restore the microbiota after damage of the microbiome. Together, the results of studies in this field emphasize the importance of developing a mechanistic understanding of gut ecology to enable the development of new therapeutic strategies and to rationally limit the use of antibiotic compounds.

Subfields: Gastroenterology, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8d3e9cd4c82e2142327b689a730bab7aee832ac

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Citations in the corpus

Host-Associated Probiotics: A Key Factor in Sustainable Aquaculture (2020, background): “Furthermore, the application of antibiotics may extend to human consumption, which could adversely affect human health and weaken the immune systems (Cheng et al. 2014; Hoseinifar et al. 2015; Langdon et al. 2016).”
BugBase predicts organism-level microbiome phenotypes (2017, background): “For example, having a better understanding of the proportion of Gram negative and Gram positive microbes in the GI tract would allow for more-targeted antibiotic treatment approaches [11], and determining the anaerobe and pathogen content of donor fecal samples could help predict the efficacy and sa”
Phage Therapy in the Postantibiotic Era (2019, background): “Due to its lack of off-target effects, phage therapy is exempt from side effects related to microbiome disturbances, such as mucosal candidiasis, antibioticassociated diarrhea, pseudomembranous colitis caused by Clostridium difficile, and even long-term metabolic and immunological disorders (46).”
Human gut microbiota/microbiome in health and diseases: a review (2020, background): “In addition, mixtures of defined species or strains, or cocktails of microbiota-derived molecules targeting specific microbial species or pathways that are enriched in the disease state, in an effort to treat or prevent various common disorders (Langdon et al. 2016).”