Functional Metagenomics

Human beings are ‘superorganisms’ and billions of microbes inhabiting the gut closely interact with human genomes and play a role in maintaining human health. Recent evidence suggests that diet, lifestyle and drugs interact and modify gut microbiome and these modifications of gut microbiota may link to many diseases such as obesity and related metabolic diseases.

Gut microbiome is known to provide refined control mechanisms on energy recovery through catabolism of poorly digestible nutrients, such as resistant starch and other polysaccharides. This symbiotic condition influences host metabolism, physiology and gene expression. For example, gut microbial bile acid co-metabolism is known to be closely involved in host energy metabolism and modulate lipid regulation in the host via nuclear receptor interaction.

Therefore, application of the new strategy of metabolic phenotyping and metagenomic technologies to investigate the correlation of metabolites and microbes under various health statuses may provide new molecular insight to understand disease mechanism or verify efficacy of chemotherapies.

In collaboration with other researchers, we have introduced the concept of functional metagenomics: (Li et al. 2008)

 “The characterization of key functional members of the microbiome that most influence host metabolism and hence health.”

Key Projects

• FLORINASH
• European large-scale functional genomics in the rat for translational research (EURATRANS)

Key Recent Publications

Li M, Wang B, Zhang M, Rantalainen M, Wang S, Zhou H, Zhang Y, Shen J, Pang X, Wei H and others. 2008. Symbiotic gut microbes modulate human metabolic phenotypes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 105(6):2117-22.