Gnotobiotics infrastructure

The microbiome is a flagship topic within the clinical and translational research in Schleswig-Holstein. Several therapeutic principles that aim at modulating the microbiome in chronic inflammatory diseases emerged from preclinical work performed in the Cluster of Excellence Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation (PMI), and are currently undergoing clinical trials. Additional findings showed that microbial communities also play a role in oncology and neurology, for example in the response to checkpoint inhibitors or in the progression of neurodegenerative events. The field of gnotobiology deals with the experimental investigation of animals that are germ-free, or with a microbiome of defined composition. Gnotobiology can then be used to investigate disease mechanisms that involve microbes, e.g. gut microbial metabolic pathways that influence immunosuppressive therapies. As such, the gnotobiotic mice husbandry is a critical infrastructure for functional microbiome studies in order to increase the efficiency of precision medicine in the future.  

The establishment of the first gnotobiotic mice facility in Schleswig-Holstein in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön (MPI-EB) was decisive to make scientific breakthroughs on the microbiome and precision medicine.