Michael Harrop
Active member
The article/study is from 2015 but someone brought it up recently in another discussion.
Article/interview: https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_6699tga9
Reporting on this study: MHC variation sculpts individualized microbial communities that control susceptibility to enteric infection https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4621775/
Yet they showed that despite MHC differences they were able to transfer the protective microbes from one strain of mouse to the other via FMT.
This doesn't support donor matching.
Maybe things like MHC have impacts on initial colonization, and/or trends towards certain compositions, but since they were able to transfer the protective microbes from one strain of mouse to another their experiment does not support the statement that "you might have to MHC match for microbes".
To the contrary, it seems plausible that MHC could be used to identify high quality donors.
Their comment about probiotics is misleading in that it ignores the host-native factor, and the large person to person uniqueness of gut microbiome to where of course various people are going to have different niches full/available for various probiotics. Similar situation for FMT.
For example, even with me and the same FMT donor, there is significant variation in the effectiveness/impact of each FMT I do from them, even from the same donor sample (EDIT: I think this may be due to the distribution of microbes in the liquid suspension - using the whole thing at one time would have given exposure to all the microbes in it). After some FMTs from them I was doing well on nuts & olive oil, then I took a large bunch of various probiotics which disrupted things, had to do the FMT again, but this time I'm not doing well on nuts and olive oil (EDIT: this may have partially been due to iodized salt, which seems to have similar antimicrobial effects as when I took iodine supplement directly).
I've also experienced the same phenomena with probiotics. In that at some points certain ones were highly beneficial. But after various microbiome changes (via other probiotics, FMT, antibiotics), the impacts of those probiotics was significantly changed.
Thus I believe niches to be the correct line of thinking.
You cannot even start to think about donor matching until donor quality standards are met: https://archive.fo/p7nH3#selection-2265.11-2269.0
EDIT: Seemed like I might have been experiencing this reconstitution impairment by the large bunch of probiotics I took: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.08.047. But it looks like I was able to get back to "doing well on nuts and olive oil" - more like "close to it".
Original 03 May 2019 (6 comments).
Article/interview: https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_6699tga9
Reporting on this study: MHC variation sculpts individualized microbial communities that control susceptibility to enteric infection https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4621775/
Yet they showed that despite MHC differences they were able to transfer the protective microbes from one strain of mouse to the other via FMT.
This doesn't support donor matching.
Maybe things like MHC have impacts on initial colonization, and/or trends towards certain compositions, but since they were able to transfer the protective microbes from one strain of mouse to another their experiment does not support the statement that "you might have to MHC match for microbes".
To the contrary, it seems plausible that MHC could be used to identify high quality donors.
Their comment about probiotics is misleading in that it ignores the host-native factor, and the large person to person uniqueness of gut microbiome to where of course various people are going to have different niches full/available for various probiotics. Similar situation for FMT.
For example, even with me and the same FMT donor, there is significant variation in the effectiveness/impact of each FMT I do from them, even from the same donor sample (EDIT: I think this may be due to the distribution of microbes in the liquid suspension - using the whole thing at one time would have given exposure to all the microbes in it). After some FMTs from them I was doing well on nuts & olive oil, then I took a large bunch of various probiotics which disrupted things, had to do the FMT again, but this time I'm not doing well on nuts and olive oil (EDIT: this may have partially been due to iodized salt, which seems to have similar antimicrobial effects as when I took iodine supplement directly).
I've also experienced the same phenomena with probiotics. In that at some points certain ones were highly beneficial. But after various microbiome changes (via other probiotics, FMT, antibiotics), the impacts of those probiotics was significantly changed.
Thus I believe niches to be the correct line of thinking.
You cannot even start to think about donor matching until donor quality standards are met: https://archive.fo/p7nH3#selection-2265.11-2269.0
EDIT: Seemed like I might have been experiencing this reconstitution impairment by the large bunch of probiotics I took: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.08.047. But it looks like I was able to get back to "doing well on nuts and olive oil" - more like "close to it".
Original 03 May 2019 (6 comments).