Explore the vast range of titles available.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is still one of the most common types of cancer in the world, and the gut microbiome plays an important role in its development. The microbiome is involved in the carcinogenesis, formation and progression of CRC as well as its response to different systemic therapies. The composition of bacterial strains and the influence of geography, race, sex, and diet on the composition of the microbiome serve as important information for screening, early detection and prediction of the treatment outcome of CRC. Microbiome modulation is one of the most prospective new strategies in medicine to improve the health of individuals. Therefore, future research and clinical trials on the gut microbiome in oncology as well as in the treatment of CRC patients are warranted to determine the efficacy of systemic treatments for CRC, minimize adverse effects and increase survival rates.

Previous studies demonstrated that multi-strain probitics could more strongly regulate intestinal cytokines and the mucosal barrier than the individual ingredient strains. Nevertheless, the potentially different gut microbiome modulation effects between multi-strain and single-strain probiotics treatments remain unexplored. Here, we administered three different Lactiplantibacillus plantarum strains or their mixture to healthy Wistar rats and compared the shift of gut microbiome among the treatment groups. A 4-week intervention with mixed probiotics induced more drastic and diversified gut microbiome modulation than single-strain probiotics administration (alpha diversity increased 8% and beta diversity increased 18.7%). The three single-strain probiotics treatments all converged the gut microbiota, decreasing between-individual beta diversity by 12.7% on average after the treatment, while multi-strain probiotics treatment diversified the gut microbiome and increased between-individual beta diversity by 37.2% on average. Covariation analysis of the gut microbes suggests that multi-strain probiotics could exert synergistic, modified and enhanced modulation effects on the gut microbiome based on strain-specific modulation effects of probiotics. The more heterogeneous responses to the multi-strain probiotics treatment suggest that future precision microbiome modulation should consider the potential interactions of the probiotic strains, and personalized response to probiotic formulas due to heterogenous gut microbial compositions.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) remains difficult to manage in patients who fail multiple therapeutic lines, and growing evidence suggests that alterations in the gut microbiome contribute to persistent symptoms and inflammatory activity. This study evaluated a three-month, AI-guided, multi-omic personalized microbiome modulation program in adults with treatment-refractory IBD. Baseline stool metagenomic sequencing, blood biomarkers, micronutrient panels, and clinical data were integrated through an artificial intelligence platform to generate individualized plans combining dietary adjustments, targeted synbiotics, selective antimicrobials, and micronutrient correction. Clinical outcomes, inflammatory markers, and microbial signatures were reassessed after three months. Across 358 participants, stool frequency decreased substantially, urgency and rectal bleeding resolved in most patients, and over 70% reported a “much improved” overall condition. Inflammatory biomarkers showed marked normalization, with reductions in hs-CRP and fecal calprotectin observed in over 85% of cases. Micronutrient deficiencies, particularly iron and zinc, also improved, and beneficial microbial taxa such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Bifidobacterium longum, and Akkermansia muciniphila increased significantly. These findings suggest that personalized, multi-omic microbiome modulation may support clinically meaningful improvements by targeting microbial, metabolic, and immune imbalances rather than symptoms alone. While encouraging, these results require confirmation in randomized controlled studies.

Functional foods have gained increasing attention for their dual role in providing essential nutrition and promoting health through the presence of bioactive compounds. These compounds, naturally found in a variety of plant and animal sources, include polyphenols, carotenoids, omega‐3 fatty acids, probiotics, prebiotics, alkaloids, and terpenoids. They exhibit a wide range of therapeutic effects, mediated through mechanisms such as antioxidant activity, anti‐inflammatory responses, modulation of gut microbiota, and enzyme inhibition. This review offers a comprehensive classification of these key bioactive compounds, detailing their natural origins with an emphasis on their mechanisms of action. Additionally, it explores their incorporation into diverse functional food matrices, including fortified beverages, dairy products, snack items, and dietary supplements. Modern biotechnological and AI‐driven approaches have revolutionized the precision, efficacy, and characterization of functional food products by enabling high‐throughput screening of bioactive compounds, predictive modeling for formulation, and large‐scale data mining to identify novel ingredient interactions and health correlations. Despite the growing popularity of functional foods, challenges persist in terms of the stability and bioavailability of bioactive compounds, regulatory hurdles, and consumer acceptance. Addressing these issues is critical to ensuring the efficacy and safety of functional food products. The review also highlights future perspectives in the field, emphasizing the need for innovative delivery systems and multidisciplinary research to enhance the bioavailability, functionality, and accessibility of these products. By highlighting the challenges and proposing possible solutions, this review serves as a foundational reference for bridging the gap among researchers, healthcare professionals, and stakeholders. Functional foods enriched with bioactive compounds such as polyphenols, carotenoids, omega‐3 fatty acids, and probiotics provide therapeutic benefits through antioxidant, anti‐inflammatory, and gut‐modulating mechanisms. Advances in biotechnology and AI have improved screening, formulation, and delivery of these compounds in diverse food matrices including dairy, beverages, and supplements. Despite challenges in stability, bioavailability, and regulation, innovative strategies and multidisciplinary research offer promising solutions to enhance efficacy, safety, and consumer acceptance of functional foods.

This chapter details well‐established ideas within the microbiome field relating to the interplay between our microbiota and diet and their associations with long‐term health over the course of our lives. The chapter details what the microbiota and microbiome are, how the microbiota is established, and how nutrition plays a major role in the progression of the microbiota throughout our lives. Initially the chapter details the establishment of the microbiota and the influence of early‐life diet. It characterizes the progression to a more adult‐like microbiota due to dietary changes and places the adult microbiota in the context of the different dietary and lifestyle choices we make as adults, the influence these have on our body mass index, and how this may influence our health. Finally, we detail the effect of diet and the microbiota on our health as we reach an advanced age and how the microbiota may be maintained or modulated through diet.

Blastocystis is the most common gastrointestinal protist found in humans and animals. Although the clinical significance of Blastocystis remains unclear, the organism is increasingly being viewed as a commensal member of the gut microbiome. However, its impact on the microbiome is still being debated. It is unclear whether Blastocystis promotes a healthy gut and microbiome directly or whether it is more likely to colonize and persist in a healthy gut environment. In healthy people, Blastocystis is frequently associated with increased bacterial diversity and significant differences in the gut microbiome. Based on current knowledge, it is not possible to determine whether differences in the gut microbiome are the cause or result of Blastocystis colonization. Although it is possible that some aspects of this eukaryote’s role in the intestinal microbiome remain unknown and that its effects vary, possibly due to subtype and intra-subtype variations and immune modulation, more research is needed to characterize these mechanisms in greater detail. This review covers recent findings on the effects of Blastocystis in the gut microbiome and immune modulation, its impact on the microbiome in autoimmune diseases, whether Blastocystis has a role like bacteria in the gut–brain axis, and its relationship with probiotics.

Multicellular life arose in a world dominated by microorganisms, a reality that has imposed a constant and pervasive selective pressure on all subsequent complex organisms. The immune system has been historically defined by its role in pathogen clearance through resistance mechanisms. However, a complementary and equally critical strategy is to enable the peaceful and inevitable coexistence with microorganisms, allowing each host species to shelter a unique associated microbiome. The term tolerance holds multiple meanings in immunology, yet all underlie a balanced and cooperative host-microorganism relationship. Each represents a different aspect of how the immune system limits tissue damage while maintaining functionality in the presence of microbial or inflammatory stimuli. Using the intestinal mucosa as a paradigm, we explore how epithelial barrier integrity, toxin neutralization, tissue repair, and stress response underpin disease tolerance; how microbial exposure calibrates innate immunity via epigenetic and metabolic reprogramming (LPS tolerance); and how the gut microenvironment fosters the generation of tolerogenic antigen-presenting cells and microbe-specific regulatory T cells to enforce immunological tolerance. We further explore how the microbiota itself is a potent inducer of these tolerogenic pathways and highlight IL-10 as a major hub, connecting different tolerogenic circuits. Finally, we examine the hygiene hypothesis, arguing that lifestyle changes during the Anthropocene disrupt these finely tuned tolerance mechanisms, thereby contributing to the rising incidence of immune-mediated diseases. We posit that these tolerance programs are fundamental prerequisites for engendering host-microbiota symbiosis, a relationship forged over millennia of co-evolution and endangered in the contemporary world.

The gut microbiome (GM) plays an essential role in health, and its dysbiosis can increase the risk of colon cancer. While the detrimental effects of high-dose ionizing radiation on GM have been documented, little is known about the effects of low doses, including from internal exposure to tritium, which is produced by nuclear power generation and emits beta radiation, making it a public concern. We examined the effects of chronic irradiation with internal tritium beta radiation or external 60Co gamma radiation on GM and intestinal tumorigenesis in the ApcMin/+ mouse model of colorectal cancer. Mice were exposed to tritiated drinking water (HTO) or gamma radiation at cumulative doses of 0, 10, 100, and 2,000 mGy, followed by intestine, blood plasma, and fecal sample collections at 12, 16, and 20 weeks of age. HTO- and gamma-exposed cohorts had distinct tumor size and multiplicity patterns, with non-monotonous dose-responses. Complex patterns of blood cytokine changes with age, dose, and type of irradiation were recorded. GM analyses using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing revealed significant changes in alpha and beta diversity in irradiated mice compared to controls, indicating altered microbial dynamics. HTO and gamma radiation induced distinct microbiome changes that did not correlate with tumor and blood cytokine readouts. Our results suggest that chronic exposure to low-dose gamma- or internal HTO beta radiation can affect GM in a radiation type and dose-dependent non-linear manner. Our results provide novel insight into the effects of low-dose gamma- and tritium beta radiation on GM and a possible association with tumorigenesis.IMPORTANCELow-dose ionizing radiation is one of the few environmental stressors that simultaneously reshapes host physiology and the structure-function landscape of resident microbiomes, yet mechanistic insight at ecologically relevant doses has been scarce. By integrating longitudinal 16S rRNA profiling, multiplex cytokine analyses, and quantitative tumor phenotyping in the ApcMin/+ mouse model, our study demonstrates that continuous exposure to either external 60Co γ-photons or tritium beta particles perturbs gut microbial community structure in radiation-quality-specific ways and that these shifts track with, and sometimes precede, complex, non-monotonic changes in intestinal tumor burden. The work expands the traditional radiobiology focus from host-centric DNA damage to a systems-level view in which microbe-host-radiation interactions form a dynamic network influencing early colorectal carcinogenesis.

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) is an emerging diagnosis with symptoms that overlap with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Using shotgun metagenomics and metabolomics, we report deeper insights into the microbiome profile, including viral and archaeal diversity, lower fructan degradation potential, the differential abundance of metabolites, and genomic features of gut bacteria in patients with NCGS. Understanding the microbiome associated with this disorder may shed light on the possible role of the microbiome in the pathophysiology of NCGS.

The gut microbiome plays a vital role in human health, functioning as a metabolic organ that influences nutrient absorption and overall well-being. With growing evidence that dietary interventions can modulate the microbiome and improve health, this review examines whether healthcare systems should prioritize personalized microbiome-targeted therapies, such as probiotics, prebiotics, and microbiota transplants, over traditional pharmaceutical treatments for chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular risk, and inflammatory conditions. A systematic review using Web of Science and Scopus databases was conducted, followed by a scientometric analysis. Key metabolic pathways, such as dietary fiber fermentation and short-chain fatty acid production, were explored, focusing on their impact on lipid and glucose metabolism. The interactions between microbial metabolites and the immune system were also investigated. Dietary interventions, including increased fiber and probiotic intake, show potential for addressing dysbiosis linked to conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and autoimmune diseases. The review emphasizes the need to incorporate microbiome modulation strategies into clinical practice and research, calling for a multidisciplinary approach that integrates nutrition, microbiology, and biochemistry to better understand the gut microbiome’s complex role in health.