The Fungus Inside Us
Researchers had limited knowledge of the gut fungi, or mycobiota, and its influence on the developing immune system of young children. With our collaborators, we discovered dynamic changes in children’s mycobiota during their first year of life and offered a tool for predicting the likelihood of a child developing environmental allergies by their 5th birthday.
With advanced bioinformatics techniques and data collected from the stool samples of 343 infants from the CHILD (Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development) cohort, we discovered the identities of these little-known fungal communities. We assessed the relationships between fungal community composition and environmental factors like where infants live, their diets, and seasons of birth. Potential links between infant gut mycobiota and the development of allergies in childhood were also investigated. Using a set of early-life environmental factors in combination with fungal community composition at 1 year of age, we developed a predictive model for the tendency to develop diseases such as allergies and asthma.
This work highlights the important role of infant gut mycobiota in immune system development, and shows the promise of modifying gut mycobiota as a viable therapeutic intervention when faced with early risk factors for asthma and environmental allergies.
Read more here: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.03396-20
