It’s called Blastocystis, it’s a non-bacteria that lives in the intestine and – far from being an “unwanted parasite” as it was considered in the past – it plays a key role in the relationship between diet and health. In short, it also depends on it if each of us responds differently to a certain diet, resulting more or less predisposed to developing intestinal and cardiometabolic diseases. A research group from the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan and the University of Trento discovered this in a study published in ‘Cell’ and funded by the English start-up Zoe and by various European Community programs.
The work, coordinated by Nicola Segata, full professor of the Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrated Biology (Cibio) of the University of Trento and principal investigator at the Laboratory of Computational Metagenomics of the Ieo, and by Francesco Asnicar, researcher at Cibio, collaborated with other Italian teams from the University of Naples Federico II and the University of Sassari, and several international groups, in particular from King’s College London in the UK and Harvard in Boston, USA. The authors collected and analyzed 56,989 samples of intestinal microbiota from people in 32 countries, to analyze how the presence of Blastocystis is associated with diet and health.
Blastocystis, a eukaryotic microorganism of the intestinal microbiota, was already known to Segata’s team. In a previous study on about a thousand people, the team had in fact noticed that subjects with Blastocystis showed more favorable glycemic responses, that is, a smaller increase in the glycemic index in response to sugar intake. The new study went further, showing that the prevalence of Blastocystis is linked to geography, lifestyle and eating habits, and that its presence corresponds to a lower body mass index and a lower probability of cardiometabolic diseases.
“With this work – says Elisa Piperni, a PhD student at Semm (European School of Molecular Medicine), researcher at Segata’s group in IEO and first author of the article – we have shown that Blastocystis is more prevalent and abundant in normal weight people than in obese people, in healthy subjects than in subjects with intestinal or systemic diseases, in those who more frequently consume foods rich in fiber and little processed, and in subjects with blood parameters indicative of cardiometabolic health, compared to values associated with states of inflammation, high cholesterol and glycemia or hypertension. Today we know that the microbiota plays a fundamental role in our health and that its composition is linked to diet, however the microorganisms and mechanisms responsible for this link are only partially known. In particular, the role of the non-bacterial component of the microbiota, and more specifically of unicellular eukaryotes of which Blastocystis is a part, has been neglected in the past. Blastocystis was considered an unwanted parasite. Instead, we show that it is a health indicator that helps explain why each of us has an individual response to diet.”
“With this study – comment Segata and Asnicar – we have opened a new promising line of research on the eukaryotes present in the human microbiota, which we have only begun to scratch the surface by investigating the role of Blastocystis. Now we need to discover how this microorganism carries out a positive function. Our research has made use of metagenomics, a high-resolution biotechnological tool that allows us to study all the DNA of a microbial community, and of computational and artificial intelligence methods that allow us to identify associations between characteristics of the microbiota and characteristics of individuals. However, specific in vitro experiments will be necessary to understand how Blastocystis acts on our body. The important indication that emerges is that if we really want to draw on the enormous treasure of information of the microbiota, and above all understand its impact on our health, future analyses will have to focus not only on bacteria, but also on eukaryotes, fungi and viruses. A greater understanding of all the components of the microbiota will allow us to exploit them in the future to develop precision medicine and nutrition therapies”.
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