Fatty is not that bad: feeding short-chain fatty acids to restrain autoimmunity

摘要

Do environmental cues,and commensal bacteria in particular,have an impact on autoimmunity,and can we modulate the production of gut microbial metabolites to re-equilibrate immune responses as well as restrain autoimmune diseases?Mariño et al.1 elegantly addressed these issues in a very recent Nature Immunology paper.They report that diets designed to release large amounts of the microbial metabolites acetate and butyrate finely tune autoreactive immune responses,which lends weight to the fascinating hypothesis that medicinal foods and metabolites might contribute to treating autoimmune diseases.