Publications by authors named "Meghna Agarwal"
Article Synopsis
- Microbiomes, the diverse collections of microorganisms associated with humans and animals, are essential for health, but their assembly mechanisms are not well understood.
- Dispersal of microorganisms between hosts has a significant impact on microbiome variation, sometimes overshadowing individual host factors.
- An experiment with zebrafish showed that interhost dispersal affected the diversity and composition of intestinal microbiomes, indicating that dispersal plays a crucial role in shaping the ecology of these communities.
Animal hosts must co-exist with beneficial microbes while simultaneously being able to mount rapid, non-specific, innate immune responses to pathogenic microbes. How this balance is achieved is not fully understood, and disruption of this relationship can lead to disease. Excessive inflammatory responses to resident microbes are characteristic of certain gastrointestinal pathologies such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
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