Antibiotics as both friends and foes of the human gut microbiome: The microbial community approach

• Articles in SCI Journals
• Apr, 2019

Summary:

The exposure of the human gut to antibiotics can have a great impact on human health. Antibi-otics pertain to the preservation of human health and are useful tools for fighting bacterial infec-tions. They can be used for curing infections and can play a critical role in immunocompromisedor chronic patients, or in fighting childhood severe malnutrition. Yet, the genomic and phyloge-netic diversity of the human gut changes under antibiotic exposure. Antibiotics can also havesevere side effects on human gut health, due to the spreading of potential antibiotic resistancegenetic traits and to their correlation with virulence of some bacterial pathogens. They canshape, and even disrupt, the composition and functioning diversity of the human gut micro-biome. Traditionally bacterial antibiotic resistances have been evaluated at clone or populationlevel. However, the understanding of these two apparently disparate perspectives as bothfriends and foes may come from the study of microbiomes as a whole and from the evaluationof both positive and negative effects of antibiotics on microbial community dynamics and diver-sity. In this review we present some metagenomic tools and databases that enable the studyingof antibiotic resistance in human gut metagenomes, promoting the development of personalizedmedicine strategies, new antimicrobial therapy protocols and patient follow-up.

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ddr.21466