A new lexicon in the age of microbiome research

Creators: Bosch, Thomas C. G.; Blaser, Martin J.; Ruby, Edward¹; McFall-Ngai, Margaret¹

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

At a rapid pace, biologists are learning the many ways in which resident microbes influence, and sometimes even control, their hosts to shape both health and disease. Understanding the biochemistry behind these interactions promises to reveal completely novel and targeted ways of counteracting disease processes. However, in our protocols and publications, we continue to describe these new results using a language that originated in a completely different context. This language developed when microbial interactions with hosts were perceived to be primarily pathogenic, as threats that had to be vanquished. Biomedicine had one dominating thought: winning this war against microorganisms. Today, we know that beyond their defensive roles, host tissues, especially epithelia, are vital to ensuring association with the normal microbiota, the communities of microbes that persistently live with the host. Thus, we need to adopt a language that better encompasses the newly appreciated importance of host-microbiota associations. We also need a language that frames the onset and progression of pathogenic conditions within the context of the normal microbiota. Such a reimagined lexicon should make it clear, from the very nature of its words, that microorganisms are primarily vital to our health, and only more rarely the cause of disease.

Copyright and License

© 2024 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

Acknowledgement

M.J.B., M.M.-N. and T.C.G.B. appreciate support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program of Humans and the Microbiome (HMB).

Funding

Research in the laboratory of T.C.G.B. is supported in part by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), the CRC 1182 ‘Origin and Function of Metaorganisms’ (to T.C.G.B.), and the CRC 1461 ‘Neurotronics: Bio-Inspired Information Pathways’. Research in the laboratories of M.M.-N. and E.R. is supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant nos R37-AI050661 and R01-GM135254), and the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation (grant nos 9328 and 12342). Relevant research in the laboratory of M.J.B. is supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant nos U01-AI22285 and R01-AI15911).

Contributions

T.C.G.B.: conceptualization, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing; M.J.B.: conceptualization, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing; E.R.: conceptualization, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing; M.M.-N.: conceptualization, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.

All authors gave final approval for publication and agreed to be held accountable for the work performed therein.

Data Availability

This article has no additional data.

Conflict of Interest

We declare we have no competing interests.

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