Prof. Gilles Storelli Physiology and Symbiosis
We use genetically tractable symbiotic systems to understand how gut bacteria influence animal physiology and metabolism.
Our Focus:
Metabolism is the foundation of life. It provides organisms with the energy, cellular building blocks, and signaling molecules that are essential for development, reproduction, and homeostasis. The overall metabolic capabilities of animals are encoded in their own genome, but also in their microbiome - the set of genes carried by symbiotic microorganisms. Our group studies the metabolic interactions between animals and their gut bacteria. We use genetically tractable symbiotic systems - Drosophila fruit flies associated with model gut bacteria - to explore how bacterial metabolism supports animal physiology. We also investigate how perturbations in host-microbe interactions contribute to conditions such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and aging, a complex biological process characterized by nutritional, metabolic and immune decline.
Our approaches
We believe that we cannot fully understand how the microbiome shapes animal physiology without knowing how animals themselves shape the function of their microbiomes. Therefore, we study host-microbiome interactions from three perspectives: microbes, hosts, and holobionts - the biological entities composed of an animal and its symbiotic bacteria. More precisely, we investigate how the digestive system shapes bacterial metabolism and physiology, and how bacteria in turn affect gut function. We then integrate our observations in animals and bacteria to understand how holobionts cope with nutritional and metabolic perturbations.
Gut, microbes and metabolism.
Transverse view of the Drosophila intestine. Luminal bacteria and cell nuclei appear in magenta, the apical brush border of enterocytes and visceral muscles in gray, and cytoplasmic lipid droplets in cyan.
A wide variety of bacteria (magenta) can be seen in the gut lumen, in close proximity to the intestinal epithelium (gray). Gut bacteria play a critical role in animal nutrition by producing essential nutrients or assisting in nutrient absorption (dietary lipids that were recently absorbed by enterocytes appear in cyan). As a result, alterations in host-microbiome interactions can lead to various physiological defects, including nutritional and metabolic disorders, immune and inflammatory diseases, and contribute to organismal aging.
