ABOVE: © BONNIE HOFKIN
Like the hands that pull the strings at a marionette puppet show, our resident microbes influence the day-to-day running of virtually all of our biological systems. For instance, host-microbe interactions during the first three years of life are particularly important for the development of the immune system, and perturbances to the gut microbiota, or dysbiosis, during this critical time in early life can have long-lasting detrimental effects on health. Until very recently, this microbe-mediated immune education was thought to be initiated when a newborn baby leaves the relatively sterile environment of the uterus and is seeded with its mother’s microbes, but work from our group and others in the last few years has shown that the maternal microbiome can exert its influence even earlier—on the gestating fetus.
In the mid-2010s, when we started our work on the role of the maternal microbiome during pregnancy, there was ...
