Microbiome: The bacterial tightrope

Katherine Bourzac

Nature

516,

S14–S16

(04 December 2014)

doi:10.1038/516S14a

Published online: 03 December 2014

Imbalances in gut bacteria have been implicated in the progression from liver disease to cancer. This insight opens the way to preventive treatments.

Subject terms:

Katie Scott

In 2012, Eiji Hara was studying the effects of a high-fat diet on cancer risk in mice. Researchers had known for many years that obesity was associated with liver cancer; Hara wanted to find out why. After deep study of the connection, he found something unanticipated: a link to bacteria living in the gut¹.

“We never expected a connection with the microbiome,” says Hara, who is a biologist at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in Tokyo. Yet when he and his colleagues exposed obese mice to a carcinogen that normally causes liver cancer and then gave them antibiotics, they found that killing the bacteria had a protective effect: the animals did not develop the disease.