Gut Check

“I work in an area that a lot of nonscientific people read about,” says June Round, PhD, a professor of pathology in the Spencer Fox Eccles Division of Microbiology and Immunology. “People are interested in probiotics—that’s the general term—because they see it every day in the store or on a commercial. A vast majority of them have a bit of working knowledge that we are covered in microbes and that those microbes could have benefits. They’re really interested to know if it’s all fake hype or if there’s substantial science that backs it up.”

Round’s area of study, the microbiota and its role in health, is emergent and exciting. Not long ago, few people—Round included—knew much about the microbiota, a community of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses that live on and inside the body. But these days, there’s plenty of science to back up the importance of the microbiota, thanks in part to Round’s laboratory—and the 14 members of her lab who work with partners across the U and the globe to advance understanding of mucosal immunology and the complex interplay between the human host and microorganisms.

UtahMed sat down for a conversation with Round, a look inside the gut, and why it has everyone chattering.

WHEN DID YOUR CAREER COME INTO FOCUS?

Being trained as an immunologist, you’re taught that the function of your immune system is to recognize things that are not part of your body—foreign entities like microbes—and then target them and get rid of them. As a graduate student at UCLA, I read a paper that made me realize we are coated in microorganisms and that they don’t necessarily cause disease. They just kind of hang out. This was my first “A-ha!” moment where I said, “Well, how in the heck can our immune system co-exist with all of these organisms that they’re supposed to recognize and then eradicate?” That idea really intrigued me. Later, I did a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Sarkis K. Mazmanian, PhD, the 2012 MacArthur “genius grant” winner. His perspective was really intriguing. The immunologists tend to think that the immune system is always in control. His perspective as a microbiologist was that microbes are really clever organisms—and they can essentially do anything. He thought that microbes were controlling how our immune system functions. That broadened my own perspective about the intricacies of microbes and the myriad ways they can potentially influence all aspects of human health.

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY ABOUT YOUR FIELD?

The most appealing part is that there is so much to discover. During my PhD, I worked in a field—immunology—that has been worked on for decades and by what felt like a million people. When you work in a competitive scientific environment, people are closed off and not willing to talk about their discoveries or next possibilities. In this field, there’s so much left to discover—so many different microbes, so many interactions—that the field is very open.

What really gets me out of bed are the things I think about in the middle of the night: the microbes—what molecules they’re making in order to influence various disease processes, whether it’s obesity, cancer, or something else. We know so little about these microbes that I feel like every day we’re discovering new mechanisms by which these microbes can influence us.

I was watching my one-year-old daughter the other day as she was obsessively closing all the cabinet doors—she just can’t stand to have them be left open. My immediate thought was, she must have gotten that genetic trait from her grandfather. But then I realized that the microbiota has been shown to influence even various aspects of behavior in mammals and carries far more genes than even our own human DNA—so perhaps she got this trait from her microbiota. This made me step back and wonder—how we think about ourselves and what makes us human just may change in the next couple of decades.

YOU VALUE CREATIVITY IN THE LAB. TELL US HOW YOU FOSTER IT.

I’m interested to know what the people in my lab think, and I meet with everyone pretty much every other week. But I’m not the person they go to if they need to troubleshoot an experiment; I’m more of the big picture, a 'Where are you going with this?' type of person. What I try to do is foster that creativity. The whole point of them doing scientific work is to learn how to think and do on their own.

Creativity in science is important because this allows you to make unique discoveries or come up with ways to overcome a particularly hard problem. I foster a community of creativity by allowing individuals to express their ideas during our various meetings—especially our lab meeting—without fear that their idea will be undervalued or made fun of. All ideas are welcome and considered, and I have found some very interesting things come up in our discussions because of this. Also, I have hired people with all sorts of expertise, including ecology, microbiology, fungal genetics, immunology, and clinicians—and that creates an environment with a diversity of opinions.

It’s during these discussions that many people in my lab have come up with unique ways to address a scientific question or a new way of thinking about something.

HOW HAS THE FIELD CHANGED IN THE PAST DECADE?

When my lab began, researchers didn’t know how many different types of microbes lived on our bodies—and it was commonly believed that they would never know because they could not be cultured in a laboratory setting. Over the past decade, we’ve made huge strides in identification, as well as culturing techniques. That makes it possible to ask specific questions about what microbes really do and allowed us to make identifications. In 2019, for example, my lab published the results of a study that identified a specific class of bacteria from the gut, Clostridia, that prevents mice from becoming obese. It was exciting but also daunting because people were so quick to think, 'Now we have a cure for obesity!' and you want to tell them to just wait, that we’ve just discovered this one little piece of a bigger puzzle. The attention was fun in the sense that a lot of the lay press was pretty surprised that bacteria could potentially be a therapeutic for obesity, but there’s a lot of work left to do.

WHAT HAS CULTURING MICROBES MEANT FOR YOUR RESEARCH?

Before that, we did a lot of animal work and were limited to observational studies. We could kind of do some sequencing techniques and say, 'X, Y, and Z are there. And if you induce a particular disease in a human or in a mouse, Z goes away, but X and Y are still there.' We could make those types of observations, but you couldn’t do causative experimentation. You couldn’t say that, 'We lost Z, but what does Z really do? If we put the Z back, do we get rid of disease?' Now that we can culture these organisms, we can ask those specific questions.

What’s important for the health aspect of all of this is that ultimately the goal is to be able to purify these beneficial organisms and then be able to give them back to people with various diseases. You can call them probiotics if you will. But really, the goal is to use these as more of a natural therapeutic. You couldn’t do that until we were able to culture them by themselves.

FOR THOSE OF US NOT IMMERSED IN THIS EVERY DAY, HOW DO WE SEPARATE FACT FROM FICTION WHEN IT COMES TO GUT HEALTH AND HOW WE SHOULD BE TREATING OUR OWN BODIES?

We still know so little about what the microbiota does for us that this question is hard to answer now. Of course, staying informed about what the research says is helpful to separate fact from fiction, and there are several science venues that provide useful information in this area for the public. One thing that appears to be good or the microbiota is fiber—so eat your vegetables!