Understanding the Gut Microbiota

This book discusses the community of microbial species (the microbiota, microbiome), which inhabits the large bowel of humans. Written from the perspective of an academic who has been familiar with the topic for 40 years, it provides a long–term perspective of knowledge about this high profile and fast–moving topic. Building on general ecological principles, the book aims to help the reader to understand how the microbiota is formed, how it works, and what the consequences are to humans.

Understanding the Gut Microbiota focuses on conceptual progress made from studies of the human bowel microbiota. Where appropriate, it draws on knowledge obtained from other animal species to provide conceptual enlightenment, but this is essentially a book about humans and their bowel microbes. Particular research approaches are recommended to fill knowledge gaps so that fundamental ecological theory and information about the microbiota can be translated into benefits for human health. The relationship between food for humans and resulting food for bowel bacteria emerges as an important topic for consideration.

This concise scholarly treatise of the microbiota of the human bowel will be of great interest and use as a text and reference work for professionals, teachers and students across a wide range of disciplines, including the health sciences, general biology, and food science and technology. The provision of handy explanation of terms means that those with a general interest in science can also read the book with enjoyment.

About the Author
Gerald W. Tannock, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Working Table of Contents (the book will be divided into three sections, each of 2 to 4 chapters):

An Evolving Saga
1. How and why did it happen?
This chapter will discuss the evolution of the human/bowel bacteria relationship.

2. A very special relationship, but why?
This chapter will record current knowledge on the topic of human infant bowel/bifdobacteria/human milk oligosaccharaides and discuss how this partnership between human infants and bifidobacteria might have evolved and whether it has purpose today.

The Rene Dubos Legacy
3. How are bacterial communities formed?
This chapter will record the work of the Rockefeller group and discuss how it has informed all subsequent ecological research on the gut microbiota.

4. Soup or biofilms?
This chapter will provide a critique of the methodologies used in bowel bacteria research.

5. Totally redundant?
This chapter will discuss how bowel bacteria communities are formed, and what predicates their composition in a particular human.

A Dead–End?
6. Phylogenetic analysis but then what?
Analyzes methodologies involved with bacterial physiology.

7. Compositional shifts in bacterial communities: can we realistically do anything about it?

8. Hygiea versus Aesclapius?
Medicine driven and ecology driven research approaches will be compared and discussed in this chapter.

9. Winogradsky had the right approach?
This chapter will contain arguments that modeling of the microbiota in relation to its ecology will not only generate fundamental information about how the bacterial community of the bowel works, but will also diminish the need for costly trials of novel formualtion