In the study published in the journal Trends in Microbiology on October 11, entitled Decoding the microbiome: advances in genetic manipulation for gut bacteria, Prof. CHAO Yanjie’s group at the Institute of Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. MA Yanlei’s group at Fudan University reviewed the latest advances and challenges in genetic manipulation for gut bacteria, as well as the value and prospects for the application of engineered bacteria against human diseases.
Specific bacterial species or community are closely related to human health, and play important roles in the human immune system, metabolic diseases, and pathogen infections. However, limited genetic manipulation (GM) tools for gut bacteria hinder the understanding of the causal relationships and molecular mechanisms between gut bacteria and diseases.
Generic, efficient and practical genetic manipulation techniques are crucial to "tame" the microbiome, allowing people not only to better understand the host–microbiome interactions but also to accelerate microbiome engineering for novel therapeutics.
The researchers comprehensively reviewed the current advances and challenges in developing genetic manipulation approaches for gut microbiome, including the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas-based and transposase-based systems in both model and non-model gut bacteria.
Finally, researchers provide perspectives on the future development of GM for gut microbiome species, where more effort should be placed on assembling a generalized GM pipeline to accelerate the application of groundbreaking GM tools in non-model gut bacteria towards both basic understanding and clinical translation.
Genetic manipulation and genome-editing strategies for human gut bacteria. (Image by SIII）
Contact
CHAO Yanjie
Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection, CAS
E-mail: yjchao@siii.cas.cn
Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2023.05.007
