Catherine A. Lozupone | |
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Born | Catherine Anne Lozupone 1975 (age 46–47) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Villanova University Colorado State University University of Colorado Boulder |
Doctoral advisor | Rob Knight |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Colorado Denver |
Main interests | microbiologist |
Notable works | Diversity,Stability and Resilience of the Human Gut Microbiota |
Catherine Anne Lozupone (born 1975) is an American microbiologist who specializes in bacteria and how they impact human health. Her noted work in trying to determine what constitutes "normal" gut bacteria,led to her creation of the UniFrac algorithm,used by researchers to plot the relationships between microbial communities in the human body.
Catherine A. Lozupone earned a Bachelor of Science from Villanova University in 1997 and went on to obtain a master's degree from Colorado State University in Fort Collins,Colorado in 1999. [1] She went on to complete her doctoral work at the University of Colorado Boulder studying under Rob Knight,who is the founder of the American Gut Project. [2] At the time of her doctoral research,little was known about the microbiome (genes of the bacteria,archaea,microscopic eukaryotes,and viruses interacting in an environment) of the gut and the symbiotic relationship between host and bacteria. Her thesis delineated the UniFrac algorithm which has allowed researchers to visualize the relationships between microbial communities in the human gut,how they interact,and how they might be related to specific diseases. [3] Lozupone's work,detailed in a 2012 paper which appeared in Nature entitled "Diversity,Stability and Resilience of the Human Gut Microbiota",was noted for its attempt to analyze what is the "normal" bacterial state in the human gut. By approaching the gut as an ecosystem,scientists are then able to factor in the effects of lifestyle,diet,health status which might change the bacterial makeup present in the gastrointestinal tract. [2]
In 2013,after completing her post-doctoral research in Knight's lab,Lozupone started her own lab at the University of Colorado Denver, [2] where she works in the Department of Biomedical Informatics as an associate professor. She has begun evaluating the composition differences in the microbiome of healthy individuals versus those of HIV positive individuals. She is attempting to determine if T cell loss causes change in the bacteria levels,thus prompting chronic inflammation for people living with HIV. [4] According to Thomson Reuters,Lozupone was one of the most cited researchers in the world in 2014. [5]
The human microbiome is the aggregate of all microbiota that reside on or within human tissues and biofluids along with the corresponding anatomical sites in which they reside, including the skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract, and gastrointestinal tract. Types of human microbiota include bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and viruses. Though micro-animals can also live on the human body, they are typically excluded from this definition. In the context of genomics, the term human microbiome is sometimes used to refer to the collective genomes of resident microorganisms; however, the term human metagenome has the same meaning.
The Bacillota are a phylum of bacteria, most of which have gram-positive cell wall structure. The renaming of phyla such as Firmicutes in 2021 remains controversial among microbiologists, many of whom continue to use the earlier names of long standing in the literature.
Gutmicrobiota are the microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea, that live in the digestive tracts of vertebrates including humans, and of insects. Alternative terms include gutflora and gutmicrobiome. The gastrointestinal metagenome is the aggregate of all the genomes of gut microbiota. In the human, the gut is the main location of human microbiota. The gut microbiota has broad impacts, including effects on colonization, resistance to pathogens, maintaining the intestinal epithelium, metabolizing dietary and pharmaceutical compounds, controlling immune function, and even behavior through the gut-brain axis.
Bacteroides is a genus of Gram-negative, obligate anaerobic bacteria. Bacteroides species are non endospore-forming bacilli, and may be either motile or nonmotile, depending on the species. The DNA base composition is 40–48% GC. Unusual in bacterial organisms, Bacteroides membranes contain sphingolipids. They also contain meso-diaminopimelic acid in their peptidoglycan layer.
Dysbiosis is characterized by a disruption to the microbiome resulting in an imbalance in the microbiota, changes in their functional composition and metabolic activities, or a shift in their local distribution. For example, a part of the human microbiota such as the skin flora, gut flora, or vaginal flora, can become deranged, with normally dominating species underrepresented and normally outcompeted or contained species increasing to fill the void. Dysbiosis is most commonly reported as a condition in the gastrointestinal tract, particularly during small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) or small intestinal fungal overgrowth (SIFO).
Skin flora, also called skin microbiota, refers to microbiota that reside on the skin, typically human skin.
Methanobrevibacter smithii is the predominant archaeon in the microbiota of the human gut. M. smithii has a coccobacillus shape. It plays an important role in the efficient digestion of polysaccharides by consuming the end products of bacterial fermentation. Methanobrevibacter smithii is a single-celled microorganism from the Archaea domain. M. smithii is a methanogen, and a hydrogenotroph that recycles the hydrogen by combining it with carbon dioxide to methane. The removal of hydrogen by M. smithii is thought to allow an increase in the extraction of energy from nutrients by shifting bacterial fermentation to more oxidized end products.
The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) was a United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) research initiative to improve understanding of the microbiota involved in human health and disease. Launched in 2007, the first phase (HMP1) focused on identifying and characterizing human microbiota. The second phase, known as the Integrative Human Microbiome Project (iHMP) launched in 2014 with the aim of generating resources to characterize the microbiome and elucidating the roles of microbes in health and disease states. The program received $170 million in funding by the NIH Common Fund from 2007 to 2016.
Microbiota are the range of microorganisms that may be commensal, symbiotic, or pathogenic found in and on all multicellular organisms, including plants. Microbiota include bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, and viruses, and have been found to be crucial for immunologic, hormonal, and metabolic homeostasis of their host.
Prevotella is a genus of Gram-negative bacteria.
Nancy A. Moran is an American evolutionary biologist and entomologist, University of Texas Leslie Surginer Endowed Professor, and co-founder of the Yale Microbial Diversity Institute. Since 2005, she has been a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Her seminal research has focused on the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum and its bacterial symbionts including Buchnera (bacterium). In 2013, she returned to the University of Texas at Austin, where she continues to conduct research on bacterial symbionts in aphids, bees, and other insect species. She has also expanded the scale of her research to bacterial evolution as a whole. She believes that a good understanding of genetic drift and random chance could prevent misunderstandings surrounding evolution. Her current research goal focuses on complexity in life-histories and symbiosis between hosts and microbes, including the microbiota of insects.
UniFrac is a distance metric used for comparing biological communities. It differs from dissimilarity measures such as Bray-Curtis dissimilarity in that it incorporates information on the relative relatedness of community members by incorporating phylogenetic distances between observed organisms in the computation.
An enterotype is a classification of living organisms based on the bacteriological composition of their gut microbiota. The discovery of three human enterotypes was announced in the April 2011 issue of Nature by Peer Bork and his associates. They found that enterotypes are not dictated by age, gender, body weight, or national divisions. There are indications that long-term diet influences enterotype. Type 1 is characterized by high levels of Bacteroides, type 2 has few Bacteroides but Prevotella are common, and type 3 has high levels of Ruminococcus.
Microbiota-accessible carbohydrates (MACs) are carbohydrates that are resistant to digestion by a host's metabolism, and are made available for gut microbes, as prebiotics, to ferment or metabolize into beneficial compounds, such as short chain fatty acids. The term, ‘‘microbiota-accessible carbohydrate’’ contributes to a conceptual framework for investigating and discussing the amount of metabolic activity that a specific food or carbohydrate can contribute to a host's microbiota.
A microbiome is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat. It was defined more precisely in 1988 by Whipps et al. as "a characteristic microbial community occupying a reasonably well-defined habitat which has distinct physio-chemical properties. The term thus not only refers to the microorganisms involved but also encompasses their theatre of activity". In 2020, an international panel of experts published the outcome of their discussions on the definition of the microbiome. They proposed a definition of the microbiome based on a revival of the "compact, clear, and comprehensive description of the term" as originally provided by Whipps et al., but supplemented with two explanatory paragraphs. The first explanatory paragraph pronounces the dynamic character of the microbiome, and the second explanatory paragraph clearly separates the term microbiota from the term microbiome.
The microbiota describes the sum of all symbiotic microorganisms living on or in an organism. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism and known as one of the most investigated organisms worldwide. The microbiota in flies is less complex than that found in humans. It still has an influence on the fitness of the fly, and it affects different life-history characteristics such as lifespan, resistance against pathogens (immunity) and metabolic processes (digestion). Considering the comprehensive toolkit available for research in Drosophila, analysis of its microbiome could enhance our understanding of similar processes in other types of host-microbiota interactions, including those involving humans. Microbiota plays key roles in the intestinal immune and metabolic responses via their fermentation product, acetate.
Microbiomes of the built environment is a field of inquiry into the communities of microorganisms that live in human constructed environments like houses, cars and water pipes. It is also sometimes referred to as microbiology of the built environment.
Pharmacomicrobiomics, first proposed by Prof. Marco Candela for the ERC-2009-StG project call and later publicly used in 2010, is defined as the effect of microbiome variations on drug disposition, action, and toxicity. Pharmacomicrobiomics is concerned with the interaction between xenobiotics, or foreign compounds, and the gut microbiome. It is estimated that over 100 trillion prokaryotes representing more than 1000 species reside in the gut. Within the gut, microbes help modulate developmental, immunological and nutrition host functions. The aggregate genome of microbes extends the metabolic capabilities of humans, allowing them to capture nutrients from diverse sources. Namely, through the secretion of enzymes that assist in the metabolism of chemicals foreign to the body, modification of liver and intestinal enzymes, and modulation of the expression of human metabolic genes, microbes can significantly impact the ingestion of xenobiotics.
The human milk microbiota, also known as human milk probiotics (HMP), refers to the microbiota residing in the human mammary glands and breast milk. Human breast milk has been traditionally assumed to be sterile, but more recently both microbial culture and culture-independent techniques have confirmed that human milk contains diverse communities of bacteria which are distinct from other microbial communities inhabiting the human body.
Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello is a Venezuelan-American microbial ecologist that has worked on adaptations of gut fermentation organs in animals, gastric colonization by bacteria, assembly of the microbiota in early life, effect of practices that reduce microbiota transmission and colonization in humans, and effect of urbanization. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the Director of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Her lab at Rutgers collaborates in multidisciplinary science, integrating microbiology, immunology, pediatrics, nutrition, anthropology, environmental engineering and architecture/urban studies, and microbial ecology.