Seven facts and five initiatives for gut microbiome research

作者：Danyi Li, Chunhui Gao, Faming Zhang, Ruifu Yang, Canhui Lan, Yonghui Ma, Jun Wang · 发表于：Protein & Cell · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.1007/s13238-020-00697-8 · 被引用次数：33 · 研究领域：Gut microbiota and health、Diet and metabolism studies、Clostridium difficile and Clostridium perfringens research

The gut microbiome has attracted increasing attention over the past 15 years. Along with the fast-growing body of research literature and media reports, the public’s opinions on the gut microbiome have begun to appear polarized. Some believe that the gut microbiome is at the core of human health and is related to every single disease. To the opposite, some people question the scientific basis of gut microbiome studies and criticize that many of them are farfetched; there is even a joke spreading in the biomedical research field—“keeping gut microbiome in mind, no mechanism is hard to find”. However, neither view is impartial. Here, we present seven facts about the gut microbiome research, and provide five initiatives to promote the healthy development of this field. There are more than 50,000 gut microbiome research articles in the database of Web of Science since 2000. Prior to 2005, the relevant publications averaged no more than 500 per year. However, as of December 18, 2019, there are already more than 9,500 publications year-to-date, which has grown about 30 times since 2000, 6 times since 2010, and doubled since 2015 (Fig. 1). Growth of gut microbiome studies in Web of Science database. Query “TS = (gut OR intestine OR bowel OR intestinal OR colon OR colorectal OR gastrointestine OR gastrointestinal) AND TS = (microbiome OR microbiota OR flora OR microbe OR microbes OR commensal OR symbiont OR pathobiont OR mycobiome OR virome OR metagenome OR meta-genome)” and then ret...