Integrative Longevity Omics (ILO) Study pursuing the role of gut bacteria in exceptional longevity

ILO investigator Daniel Segrè and his laboratory are gearing up to analyze microbiome data from the ILO centenarian and centenarian offspring participants.

In their October 2020 paper, the authors describe methods to quantify and analyze the very complex but biologically potent networks of organisms that co-exist in our guts. Bacteria in our digestive tracts synthesize important vitamins and produce metabolites, amino acids, short-chain fatty acids and other substances that have already been shown to exert strong influences on our immune and central nervous systems and more generally, aging, health and disease. Scientific work suggests that centenarians and their offspring have microbiome networks conducive to slower aging and resistance to aging related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cerebrovascular disease.

The Segrè lab’s paper describes a pipeline tool that can be used for integrating multiple data-sets, and for generating comparative analyses and consensus networks that can help understand and control microbial community assembly in different biomes.