Abstract of talk

The microbiome is global. Over the 4-billion-year history of microbial life on Earth, bacteria, archaea, microbial eukaryotes and viruses have colonised every facet and niche on this planet. Through large-scale initiatives such as the Earth Microbiome Project, we have developed the tools and the data to help to understand how human activity is influencing the microbiology of our water, air and soils. Importantly, this also extends to our food crops. Plant crops acquire their microbiome from the soils, and if those soils are disturbed the resulting shift in the microbiome may influence crop productivity, resilience to stress and even nutrient content. The same principal is true for animal crops, whereby management practices and feed stock contaminants can influence animal health and meat quality through changes to the animal’s microbiome. Understanding how disturbances in the microbial dynamics of environments and cropping systems influences human health is a key gap in current research knowledge, primarily due to the inherent complexity of scales and interactions that underpin any association. However, efforts to understand how food nutritional quality and contaminants can influence human health via changes to the gut microbiome are underway. Disturbing the human microbiome can have profound influences on human health. The immune system controls our interaction with the microbial world, and yet the microbial communities in our bodies are central to modulating the immune response. Changes in the human microbiome have substantial influence on atopy, neurological disorders, metabolic disorders, and a range of complex conditions and disease states. We will discuss evidence of these mechanisms of interaction and how we have started to disturb the delicate balance of the immune-microbe equilibrium, impacting the development and function of our immune systems. The application of new strategies to identify how the microbial health of our environments, foods and bodies correlates with diseases and treatment efficacy, through Microbiome-Wide Association Studies (MWAS), is providing an alternative approach to assessing the impact of manifold exposures on human health. New studies, such as the NIH Nutrition for Precision Health initiative, that simultaneously quantify food and environmental contaminants, additives, nutrients, pesticides, etc., while also examining how these potential insults influence host-microbiome communication, are helping us to elucidate the mechanisms that provide evidence to shift policy to improve human health protection.