Seminar by Dr. Tarini Shankar Ghosh on The gut microbiome and biological aging

Speaker: Dr. Tarini Shankar Ghosh (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IIIT-Delhi)

Title: The gut microbiome and biological aging

Abstract:

“The gut harbours one of the largest microbial communities found in human body, with more than 1.3 trillion microbial cells encoding a functional capacity estimated to be more than 150 times the coding capacity of our own. Alterations in the gut microbiome have been associated with many aspects of human physiology, some of the medically and economically significant multifactorial non-communicable diseases as well as with the treatment responses of individuals to different therapeutic interventions.

Age is one such aspect of host physiology having one of the strongest associations with the composition of the gut microbiome. Aging is associated with a progressive decline in multiple bodily functions and an onset of low-grade inflammation (referred to as ‘Inflammaging’). But even in healthy people, the gut microbiome alters with age. Are age-associated gut microbiome alterations a cause or a mere consequence of a declining state of human health? Or do these alterations indicate a transition to an even more vicious cycle of deterioration in host physiology? Can these alterations in a host be ‘reset’ using microbiome-targeted therapeutics to delay the transition to an unhealthy aging trajectory? In this talk, I will some of the recent genomic and metagenomic studies (including some of my previous works) that have attempted to answer the above questions. I will also briefly describe specific examples, where in we observed the gut microbiome to be a key transducer of the beneficial signals of diet on health of older people. Finally, my talk will provide implications for future, including the prospects of devising microbiome-targeted diagnostic/therapeutic strategies specifically customized for societies like India for improving human health.”

About the Speaker:

Tarini Shankar Ghosh is an Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi). He received his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, his M.Tech from IIT Kanpur and his Ph.D from the University of Hyderabad. After completing his PhD, he first moved to the Genome Institute of Singapore (as a post-doctoral researcher) and then to his current institute APC Microbiome Ireland at Cork. His core research focus is to understand gut microbial ecology using an in-silico approach. He uses a combination of metagenome informatics, machine learning and statistical approaches to identify the generic microbial markers of health, their variation across various population-strata, their alterations in different disease conditions and finally the formulation of personalized diet/symbiotic-based microbiome restoration strategies for improving human health. He has published more than 50 research papers in notable journals including Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Nature Aging, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Gut (British Medical Journals), Gastroenterology (American Gastroenterological Association) and Cell hosts and microbes. He has 8 US/EU based patents pertaining to metagenomic data analysis algorithms and design of microbial consortia targeted to ameliorate frailty and colorectal cancer. Dr. Ghosh was also selected for the Pathway Investigator Award by the Science Foundation of Ireland and the Irish Research Council for the year 2022. He has also been a recipient of the Yakult Young Investigator Award in the year 2014 and the Torrent Pharmaceuticals – ISHR Young Investigator Award in the year 2017.