Brain, Bacteria and Behaviour: Understanding the Gut-Brain Axis
This course was targeted at participants interested in designing, conducting and interpreting research on the associations between the gut microbiome, brain and behaviour.
Topics in the course:
- The (Systems) Biology of the Microbiota and the various routes of gut-brain communication.
- The role of the Microbiota -Gut-Brain Axis in behaviour and mental health.
- Key modifiers of the gut microbiome (nutrition, stress, age, gender and host genes)
- Current methodological approaches to analyse Microbiota -Gut-Brain Axis based hypothesis (data collection, bacterial DNA extraction, bioinformatic and statistical tools)
- Practical sessions aimed to analyse 16s RNA-gene microbiome data and associating it with brain imaging data and cognitive tasks.
Learning Outcomes
After this course you are able to:
- Understand the basic concepts of the gut microbiome biology
- Explain the various routes through which the gut and the brain influence each other
- Understand the pros and cons of using several bioinformatics pipelines for analysing and interpreting 16s RNA gut microbiome data
- Design an experiment to investigate how the gut microbiome influences brain functioning/behaviour
Programme available at the Training workshop website
