DIet As food for Gut Microbes to Impact Mother-Offspring Health through Nutrition

ongoing

The Agenda for Sustainable Development recognised reducing maternal and newborn mortality as a major challenge. Addressing health during pregnancy offers the potential to improve maternal-infant health and to facilitate women’s social participation. The gut microbiome (GM), the community of microbes that inhabit our gut, plays a key role in maintaining host health; however, the factors that modulate the GM in pregnant women remain underexplored. Being diet one of the main modulators of GM, dietary interventions are an accessible strategy to impact its composition and functionality, consequently affecting host health. Nevertheless, few studies examined how diet affects GM during pregnancy and its effects on maternal physiology. We feed millions of co-habiting bacteria that produce bioactive compounds when we eat. What are those metabolites and microbes that produce them? Can we design nutritional strategies to reduce the risk and severity of obstetric disorders? DIAMMOND (DIet As Food for Gut Microbes to Impact Mother-Offspring Health through Nutrition) aims to (i) unravel the influence of specific dietary components on the relationship between GM and the incidence and severity of foetal growth restriction (FGR); (ii) to discover GM species that catabolise these dietary components and metabolites produced; and (iii) to decipher the effects of the products on gestation. The project will create the first metagenomic database of pregnant women GM and will use it to identify the interaction of GM-diet links in healthy and FGR pregnancies. This information will guide the discovery of metabolites resulting from bacterial transformation after the in vitro digestion of the food. Finally, the mechanisms by which these metabolites impact intestinal and placental physiology will be uncovered using complex cellular models. DIAMMOND has the potential to impact dietary guidelines and the design of products or microbiome-modulation strategies to improve maternal and foetal health.