The community of microbes living on the folds of the lung’s alveoli doesn’t attract the same scientific fascination as its neighbor, the gut microbiome. But new research in rats suggests it exerts significant influence over the immune system, just like gut microbes can.
Scientists from University Medical Center Göttingen demonstrated that perturbing the rat lung microbiome—a bacterial community that was long thought to not exist—can regulate autoimmunity in the central nervous system, according to research published last month (February 23) in Nature. Specifically, the scientists found that certain microbial treatments could alter the behavior of microglial cells in the animals’ brains—cells that typically maintain the central nervous system by clearing dead or damaged cells—influencing the development of symptoms in a rat model of multiple sclerosis (MS). “We could increase or decrease the ability to develop an autoimmunity response in the [central nervous system],” study author Alexander Flügel, a neuroimmunologist at ...
