- Research has suggested that the gut microbiome is disrupted in people with Alzheimer’s disease, and researchers from Ohio now propose this could be a target for treatment.
- They propose receptors that are present in the gut and brain could be the key to targeting the gut-brain axis.
- Using existing artificial intelligence (AI) tools researchers predicted which metabolites, the by-products of bacteria in the gut, would bind with which receptors by predicting their shape.
- They then used machine learning tools to predict which receptors and metabolites could have an influence on Alzheimer’s disease, and tested lab-created neurons to observe the effect of two metabolites on tau levels, a protein whose overaccumulation is linked to cognitive impairment.
Machine learning has been used to predict how metabolites created in the gut bind with receptors found in the gut and brain.
A library of metabolites and receptor binding pairs, recently created by researchers, could be used by researchers to shed some light on the role of the microbiome in Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, OH recently evaluated the shapes of over 1 million potential pairs of metabolites and receptors to see which ones might bind together.
By identifying which metabolites bound with specific receptors, researchers were able to identify the biological pathways these metabolites might affect, and also identify the purpose of some receptors.
Lead author of the research — which appears in Cell Reports — Feixiong Cheng, PhD, director of the Cleveland Clinic Genome Center, explained in a press release:
“Gut metabolites are the key to many physiological processes in our bodies, and for every key there is a lock for human health and disease. The problem is that we have tens of thousands of receptors and thousands of metabolites in our system, so manually figuring out which key goes into which lock has been slow and costly. That’s why we decided to use AI.”
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