- [Narrator] A lot of the complex diseases that we
have seen dramatic increases in over the last few decades
are associated with abnormalities in composition
of the microbiome.
The cause effect relationship still remains
to be understood.
Clearly, we start asking the question,
what's the role of diet?
What is the role of host genetic factors
and how do all these factors converge to bring about
health or disease states?
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- [Jacques] It is just amazing to see the extent
and the efficiency of the agriculture here in Nebraska.
- Yeah, genomic selection is an important
tool in agriculture.
The University of Nebraska has an interesting program
looking at the correlations between
plants, microbes, and human health.
(soft upbeat music)
Why are diseases such as inflammatory diseases increasing
so much in the population?
- A lot of that might be due to changes in diet
that we've had over the last few decades.
One of the things you see in dietary patterns,
especially in Westernized countries, is a reduction
in the diversity of compounds that are in
a lot of the foods.
- How do you manipulate the gut ecosystem for better health?
- The number of dietary molecules or dietary compounds
that we really know about and understand just how
it influences the microbiome and the gut ecosystem
is really rather small.
We'd really like to increase that,
and be very systematic about having a whole arsenal
of molecules and food ingredients that we can use
in a very predictable way to influence health
through the gut ecosystem.
- How would you go about discovering those compounds?
- Exploit genetic diversity.
Exploit genomics of breeding in plants to be able
to screen the type of molecular diversity that
plants are capable of generating,
and let that inform us as to what potential compounds
might influence the microbiome.
- Would that be natural diversity?
- Yes, indeed, we can rely upon the natural diversity
that exists in these types of plants and exploit
that for discovery processes as you can see in the field
behind us here the amount of genetic diversity
that exists in some of these plant species
is just tremendous.
- In a field environment it's very difficult
to make many measurements of the same plant
over and over again.
One of the really exciting things here is we can measure
the same exact plants every couple of days.
We can look at variation in chemical composition
using a hyper spectral camera.
We're starting to see some very exciting things,
both about how the microbes can change the phenotype
and the health of the plant,
but also how genetic variation of the plant can control
what microbes grow on its roots.
Which changes the health of the plant.
It changes the chemical composition of the plant
and ultimately could affect the nutritional value
of the food we harvest from that plant.
- You really want to know and understand how those
bacteria interplay, what their relationship to each other,
how many of them are there,
and how many of the function are there.
Either functions that are proactively degrading proteins,
or proactively degrading carbohydrates that you're eating.
From the DNA, you basically get two information's,
who is there, which are the bacteria.
But also you get what are potential function,
and this is extremely important.
- How have we lost all these components?
Because, surely, they must have been here all the time.
- We've lost molecular diversity in our food supply,
and part of that has been through use of refined ingredients
we lose the molecular diversity.
The very molecules that are feeding the microbiome.
- Once you identify molecules that are good for the health,
how do you insert them into a diet?
- The food scientists are able to take those molecules
and formulate them, package them together
so to speak, into a food in a way that's palatable.
- We could use test kitchens to prepare novel
foods containing a prebiotic or a probiotic in it.
We have what we call our sensory analysis panel,
and they evaluate those foods.
What food scientists can do is make that ingredient
taste like something that consumers will eat.
And ultimately it gives them a health benefit.
- Genomics has a tremendous impact on our research.
It gives us a wealth of information.
We can identify specific species and members of
the gut microbiota.
A gnotobiotic mouse has a known composition
of the microbiota so you can either maintain these
animals germ free so they have no microbes
in their bodies or you can colonize them
with very specific members of a gut microbiota
in order to ask questions about the role
of those individual organisms.
We've learned that there is a relationship
or an association between changes of the composition
of a microbiome in immune mediate diseases such as
autoimmune diseases, lupus, multiple sclerosis.
- We're really in the infancy of what we understand
about the micro biome for health.
There's still a lot there that remains to be evaluated
with the gut micro biome and that's really a lot of
interesting research into, in many ways, atypical diseases.
One of the key things is is not just can you change
the gut micro biome but can you influence health
in a way that's measurable.
- What inspires you about this work?
- There's a couple of things
that really drive me, personally.
One is to be able to change the way we think
about agriculture, and to change the way we think
about a University system.
We're essentially putting together elements from
the entire University system.
Putting them together into a pipeline,
of discovery to translation.
One of the directions we want to go is to really
understand how diet interacts with that gut ecosystem,
and define molecules that can change the ecosystem.
- You know when you come to a farmers market like this
you realize how far we’ve become
disconnected from the source.
- Yeah, and in the years, with all the over-processing
of foods, we’ve lost a major component to a healthy diet.
- You know the good thing is, with the research,
that actually can tell us now what we are missing.
- And, more importantly, how to recover it.