MicrobDiab - Studies of interactions between the gut Microbiome and the human host biology to elucidate novel aspects of the pathophysiology and pathogenesis of type 2 Diabetes

The incidence of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) increases at a pandemic scale and is accompanied by severe organ damages, which results in enormous costs on the health care systems and lowers the quality of life and life expectancy of millions of people in India and Denmark. Recent research indicates that altered gut microbiota composition and function may be involved in the pathogenesis of T2D and its co-morbidities. Therefore, there is a strong rationale to explore whether interactions between the gut microbiota as evaluated at the collective microbial genome level (the microbiome) and the host biology can provide novel insights into the pathophysiology and pathogenesis of pre-diabetes and T2D.The overall objective of the proposed project is to identify gut microbiome signatures in Indian and Danish study participants which associate with pre-diabetes and T2D thereby enabling development of novel biomarkers for early diagnosis of people at high risk of progression to overt T2D.Specific objectives include -(1) performing extensive phenotyping of normoglycaemic individuals, persons with pre-diabetes, and T2D patients from India and Denmark;(2) identification of phenotype-specific gut microbiome profiles at microbial taxa levels;(3) characterization of both common and ethnic specific gut microbiome patterns, and examine how they associate with the glucose tolerance state, and other phenotypic markers;(4) development and validation of microbiome markers that discriminate between individuals having the various degrees of glucose tolerance.