The Role of Probiotics, Postbiotics, and Microbial Metabolites in Preventing and Treating Chronic Diseases

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Background

Chronic conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, are now among the greatest threats to human health. As public concerns with complex causality and long development period, chronic diseases generally cannot be cured by medication or prevented by vaccines. Finding new strategies to prevent or treat chronic diseases has long been a challenge to science.
Recently, a series of breakthrough studies in intestinal biology, especially in the fields of the gut microbiota, has made us pay close attention to the critical role of intestinal function in chronic disease treatment. Emerging evidence suggests that the gut microbiota could affect the occurrence, diagnosis, and treatment of human conditions, resulting in gut microbiota intervention as a new therapeutic strategy for chronic disorders. However, investigating the intrinsic relation between the gut microbiome and chronic conditions is still in development and requires intense concentration, although the wave of research on the gut microbiome has continued growing and the associated innovations are evolving rapidly.
Moreover, translational research on the human microbiome is gaining attention nowadays. Probiotics and their engineered strains, postbiotics, microbial metabolites, prebiotics, microbiota transplantation, and microbiota-targeted interventions are practical approaches to modulating the microbiome. Probiotics, postbiotics, and microbial metabolites are one of the most important and effective interventions. As for disease prevention and treatment, some microbiota-associated live biotherapeutic products (e.g., Akkermansia muciniphila) have been demonstrated with respectable efficacy for human disorders, including diabetes. As for the food nutrition community, supplement with probiotics or prebiotics in diet shows health-promoting benefits for the human being. Collectively, these results inspire us to explore more effective strains to prevent or treat human conditions such as chronic diseases.
Undoubtedly, exploring the human-associated microbiota provides a novel perspective for unlocking life’s mystery and unraveling the underlying basic pathogenesis of diseases such as chronic conditions. Targeting microbiota through probiotics, postbiotics, microbial metabolites, prebiotics, microbiota transplantation, and other interventions can generate new therapeutic strategies for chronic disorders in humans. Therefore, this research topic aims to explore the beneficial effects of novel probiotics, postbiotics, and microbial metabolites on chronic diseases,
determine the critical role that the human microbiome and probiotics or postbiotics play in chronic conditions changes, determine the basic principles of translational research on probiotics or postbiotics or microbial metabolites and contribute to the prevention and treatment of chronic disorders.
We welcome submissions including original research articles, clinical studies, and reviews that contribute innovative knowledge to the following but not limited to potential research topics:
•Identification of functional probiotics, postbiotics, and microbial metabolites with human health-promoting, chronic disease prevention and therapeutic properties.
•Probiotics/postbiotics or microbial metabolites supplements prevent and treat several most prevalent chronic conditions including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, mental disorders, cancers, and pulmonary conditions.
•Clinical and experimental studies using multi-omics to reveal the intrinsic relationship between human microbes/microbiota and chronic diseases.
•Translational microbiome research on chronic diseases.
•The engineered probiotics for the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases, especially related studies involved in exploring the potential molecular mechanisms of engineering microbes.
•The key technologies involved in the industrialization process of probiotics, postbiotics, and microbial metabolites.

Keywords: postbiotics, Probiotics, Microbial metabolites, Microbiome, Chronic disease, Multi-omics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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