The neuroactive landscape of the human microbiome and its social transmission

Abstract

The human gut microbiome has emerged as an active participant in host physiology, extending its reach to the brain through the microbiota-gutbrain axis. In this talk, I will present our work mapping the neuroactive potential of the human gut microbiome – the microbial capacity to produce and degrade neuroactive compounds – and its links to mental health outcomes such as quality of life and depression, established at population scale from metagenomic data. Building on this functional framework, I will then turn to a second, complementary question central to microbiome pathogenesis: how the microbiome is acquired and transmitted between individuals. I will describe how strain-level metagenomic profiling has allowed us to trace the multigenerational transmission of the gut microbiome within families and to chart the broader person-to-person transmission landscape of the gut and oral microbiomes across cohabiting individuals and social networks. Together, these findings establish a population-level framework for studying the microbiome as a socially transmitted, functionally active system with implications for host health and disease. I will discuss how this reframes our understanding of microbiome-associated conditions, and outline the translational opportunities and open challenges that follow. Further information on our group and research.