Grant: Team Grant: Biomarkers in Nutrition and Health (BioNH)

During the last decades, nutritional science and biomedicine have made a tremendous progress in the development of modern molecular and cellular research technologies resulting in the awareness that health is a condition of homeostasis not only of our different eukaryontic cells but also of the millions of microorganisms living in symbiosis on (e. g. skin) or within (e. g. gut) our human body. The aim of the consortium is to identify an indicator of that homeostasis as a biomarker for nutrition and health. The overall goal is to identify biopatterns of gut microbiome metabolites in human serum that are indicative for a symbiotic homeostasis of humans and microbes indicating a healthy nutrition and human health in general. To this end we will: (1) identify beneficial gut microbiota indicating healthy nutrition patterns in several human cohorts (FoCus, TOMORROW, FoCus re-call, PopGen). (2) detect specific metabolites and/or metabolite profiles in the human serum by advanced Metabolomics and Lipidomics which are related to the identified healthy microbiota type. (3) combine the data into a nutrition - microbiome - serum metabolite axis which is indicative for a healthy nutrition and/or human health in general. With our approach, we are extending the biomarker research on the human gut microbiome, which is heavily influenced by diet and therefore might be more suitable as a biomarker for nutrition and health compared to serum proteins. Also, we are not focusing on one certain bacterium (like on one certain serum protein) but on biopatterns of metabolites of microbiome populations indicating a symbiotic homeostasis of humans and microbes as a marker for health.