19 Feb 2024 --- Diverse communities of resident bacteria can protect the human gut from harmful pathogens by consuming nutrients that these disease-causing microorganisms need, suggest researchers at the University of Oxford, UK. They note that their findings could help develop new strategies to optimize gut health, though more research is required. In their study, the authors note that colonization resistance is a collective property of microbiome communities — meaning that a single strain is only protective when combined with others. They determined that protective bacterial communities block pathogen growth through nutrient blocking — consuming the same nutrients the pathogen needs.
