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Solutions in microbiome engineering: prioritizing barriers to organism establishment.

ABSTRACT: Microbiome engineering is increasingly being employed as a solution to challenges in health, agriculture, and climate. Often manipulation involves inoculation of new microbes designed to improve function into a preexisting microbial community. Despite, increased efforts in microbiome engineering inoculants frequently fail to establish and/or confer long-lasting modifications on ecosystem function. We posit that one underlying cause of these shortfalls is the failure to consider barriers to organism establishment. This is a key challenge and focus of macroecology research, specifically invasion biology and restoration ecology. We adopt a framework from invasion biology that summarizes establishment barriers in three categories: (1) propagule pressure, (2) environmental filtering, and (3) biotic interactions factors. We suggest that biotic interactions is the most neglected factor in microbiome engineering research, and we recommend a number of actions to accelerate engineering solutions.

SUBMITTER: Albright MBN

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8776856 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Solutions in microbiome engineering: prioritizing barriers to organism establishment.

Albright Michaeline B N MBN Louca Stilianos S Winkler Daniel E DE Feeser Kelli L KL Haig Sarah-Jane SJ Whiteson Katrine L KL Emerson Joanne B JB Dunbar John J

The ISME journal 20210821 2

Microbiome engineering is increasingly being employed as a solution to challenges in health, agriculture, and climate. Often manipulation involves inoculation of new microbes designed to improve function into a preexisting microbial community. Despite, increased efforts in microbiome engineering inoculants frequently fail to establish and/or confer long-lasting modifications on ecosystem function. We posit that one underlying cause of these shortfalls is the failure to consider barriers to organ ...[more]

PMID: 34420034

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Project description:Tsetse flies (Glossina spp.) vector pathogenic African trypanosomes, which cause sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in domesticated animals. Additionally, tsetse harbors 3 maternally transmitted endosymbiotic bacteria that modulate their host's physiology. Tsetse is highly resistant to infection with trypanosomes, and this phenotype depends on multiple physiological factors at the time of challenge. These factors include host age, density of maternally-derived trypanolytic effector molecules present in the gut, and symbiont status during development. In this study, we investigated the molecular mechanisms that result in tsetse's resistance to trypanosomes. We found that following parasite challenge, young susceptible tsetse present a highly attenuated immune response. In contrast, mature refractory flies express higher levels of genes associated with humoral (attacin and pgrp-lb) and epithelial (inducible nitric oxide synthase and dual oxidase) immunity. Additionally, we discovered that tsetse must harbor its endogenous microbiome during intrauterine larval development in order to present a parasite refractory phenotype during adulthood. Interestingly, mature aposymbiotic flies (Gmm(Apo)) present a strong immune response earlier in the infection process than do WT flies that harbor symbiotic bacteria throughout their entire lifecycle. However, this early response fails to confer significant resistance to trypanosomes. Gmm(Apo) adults present a structurally compromised peritrophic matrix (PM), which lines the fly midgut and serves as a physical barrier that separates luminal contents from immune responsive epithelial cells. We propose that the early immune response we observe in Gmm(Apo) flies following parasite challenge results from the premature exposure of gut epithelia to parasite-derived immunogens in the absence of a robust PM. Thus, tsetse's PM appears to regulate the timing of host immune induction following parasite challenge. Our results document a novel finding, which is the existence of a positive correlation between tsetse's larval microbiome and the integrity of the emerging adult PM gut immune barrier.

Project description:BackgroundCancer care is liable to medication errors due to the complex nature of cancer treatment, the common presence of comorbidities and the involvement of a number of clinicians in cancer care. While the frequency of medication errors in cancer care has been reported, little is known about their causal factors and effective prevention strategies. With a unique insight into the main safety issues in cancer treatment, frontline staff can help close this gap. In this study, we aimed to identify medication safety priorities in cancer patient care according to clinicians in North West London using PRIORITIZE, a novel priority-setting approach.MethodsThe project steering group determined the scope, the context and the criteria for prioritization. We then invited North West London cancer care clinicians to identify and prioritize main causes for, and solutions to, medication errors in cancer care. Forty cancer care providers submitted their suggestions which were thematically synthesized into a composite list of 20 distinct problems and 22 solutions. A group of 26 clinicians from the initial cohort ranked the composite list of suggestions using predetermined criteria.ResultsThe top ranked problems focused on patients' poor understanding of treatments due to language or education difficulties, clinicians' insufficient attention to patients' psychological distress, and inadequate information sharing among health care providers. The top ranked solutions were provision of guidance to patients and their carers on what to do when unwell, pre-chemotherapy work-up for all patients and better staff training. Overall, clinicians considered improved communication between health care providers, quality assurance procedures (during prescription and monitoring stages) and patient education as key strategies for improving cancer medication safety. Prescribing stage was identified as the most vulnerable to medication safety threats. The highest ranked suggestions received the strongest agreement among the clinicians.ConclusionsClinician-identified priorities for reducing medication errors in cancer care addressed various aspects of cancer treatment. Our findings open up an opportunity to assess the congruence between health care professional suggestions, currently implemented patient safety policies and evidence base.

Dataset Information

Solutions in microbiome engineering: prioritizing barriers to organism establishment.

Publications

Solutions in microbiome engineering: prioritizing barriers to organism establishment.

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