Special Issue: Gut Microbial Communities in Health and Disease

The complex and ancient relationships between animal hosts and the microbial communities that inhabit their digestive tracts have become the focus of intense research in recent years. As a result, our understanding of gut microbial ecology and of the evolutionary and physiologic impacts of gut microbial communities in animal hosts has grown markedly. Indeed, members of the gut microbiota have now been implicated as environmental factors in a wide range of human disease states. This Special Issue of Gut Microbes is written by leading researchers in the field and is intended to provide an overview of several important areas of ongoing research on gut microbial communities during health and disease in humans and other animals. Although gut microbiota has important relevance for human health today, microbial colonization of the gut and other body sites is an ancient and pervasive feature of animal ontogeny. The advent of a primitive gut in early metazoan body plans permitted the capture, concentration, and digestion of exogenous nutrients, and it also provided an attractive nutrient-rich habitat for otherwise free-living microbes. As a result, all animal lineages have established complex strategies for defending against and collaborating with members of their gut microbiota. While some of these strategies can be unique to specific animal host lineages, others are shared among different animals including humans. For this reason, experimental analyses of gut microbiota in diverse animal host models are essential for providing insights into the evolution of gut microbial ecology and host-microbiota interactions, and for identifying conserved mechanisms that might be translatable to Special Issue Gut Microbial Communities in Health and Disease