We knew that the bacteria that live in our intestine They are really positive and offer us extra protection against numerous threats from outside or even against Alzheimer’s. Now they have just added a new star function: they can help us improve our reproductive health. And all this with a simple fecal microbiota transplant.
New evidence. This same month of March the magazine Nature has published an article that breaks with several scientific paradigms and demonstrates a bidirectional communication between the microbiome and women’s ovaries.
The study here wanted to demonstrate that fecal microbiota transplant can completely remodel the behavior of the ovaries, reducing inflammation and even increasing reproductive success. But the most amazing thing about the experiment is not the ‘what’, but the ‘how’, since it has quite surprised the experimenters that the result has gone against what they expected.
How is it possible? To understand this finding, we must first know the concept of ‘strobolome‘ which will give a lot to talk about in the coming years. In a simple way, it is a set of intestinal bacteria that are capable of metabolizing and modulating the level of estrogen, which is one of the main female sex hormones and closely related to reproduction.
Until now, we knew that the microbiota played a role in almost every part of our body, ranging from digestion to our own mental health. But they wanted to go further, and in the past it was noted that they had already begun to explore how to transfer faeces from young mice to old ones, which would improve their ovarian reserve. But the best thing is that doing the opposite could accelerate the aging of the ovaries.
The new study. Knowing this, this research team designed an experiment in which healthy adult mice were taken and given antibiotics to cleanse their intestinal flora. From here, they underwent a fecal microbiota transplant from mice in the ‘estropausal’ phase, which is like human menopause.
What the researchers here were expecting is that if they were introduced to the microbiota of aged rats in reproductive decline, their ovaries would suffer damage. But the truth is that they were wrong.
Results. The results here showed that adult females who received the “estropausal” microbiota not only did not worsen, but rather improved ovarian function and an increase in their fertility.
Because? By thoroughly analyzing the organism of these ringworms, using sequencing of the genetic material of the ovaries, it was seen that the transplant had caused a massive remodeling of the ovarian transcriptome. That is, the way in which the genes in the ovaries were expressed had completely changed towards a “younger” profile.
In addition, the analyzes revealed a drastic drop in the expression of genes linked to inflammation. The explanation that scientists are considering points directly to the strobolome, since it is possible that the microbiota of the stropausal mice, in its attempt to survive the natural drop in hormones of its original host, has developed brutal compensatory mechanisms. By transplanting these “surviving, super-optimized bacteria” into a young environment, they boosted the health of the recipient ovary.
The future. Although in this case this effect has been seen in mouse animal modelsthe implications of this study may allow us to continue advancing treatments that can improve human reproductive health. The goal here is to be able to isolate what exactly are the specific microbial candidates or metabolites responsible for this improvement and in the future we could be talking about probiotic treatments or microbiome-based therapies to prolong fertility.
Images | Kelly Sikkema CDC
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