Gut Microbes

Microbiota - micronutrient interactions in modulating health and disease

Micronutrients, including vitamins and minerals, are critical for the human health.

Interestingly, micronutrition and the microbiome have a bidirectional relationship: gut microbiome can directly produce metabolites as micronutrients, metabolize and modulate the absorption of micronutrients, whereas micronutrients promote a beneficial microbial community by regulating microbiome's profile and function. Thus, these interactions impact the healthy status and risks for chronic diseases, such as cancer, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and neurodegenerative diseases.

It is important to maintain a beneficial gut microbiome and a healthy diet with adequate micronutrients. Microbiota derived metabolites act as chemical messengers that elicit a profound impact on host physiology. Thus, better understanding of the microbiota - micronutrient interactions shed lights to new mechanism, diagnosis, and therapy of diseases.

This Article Collection with research papers and reviews will spotlight the current state of microbiome-micronutrition research in the following areas:

• pathophysiology of chronic diseases,
• host-pathogen interactions,
• microbial signatures for diagnosis,
• therapeutic interventions by targeting microbiota - micronutrient interactions,
• mitochondrial function,
• microbial metabolites,
• omics data analysis, and others.

Keywords

• microbiome
• metabolite
• micronutrition
• mitochondria
• vitamin

­­All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 31 October 2026.

Please contact Zhiyuan Zhang at [email protected] with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Guest Advisors

Dr. Jun Sun is a tenured Professor of the Department of Medicine, the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. She is an elected Fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Physiological Society (APS) and American Gastroenterological Association (AGA). She has chaired the AGA Microbiome and Microbial Therapy section from 2020-2022 and co-chaired the national Task Force Committee on Omics Pathobiology in Long COVID. Her research interests are host-microbiome interactions in health and disease, particularly studying intestinal pathophysiology in human diseases, including inflammatory bowel diseases, cancer, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Dr. Di Ran is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Department of Medicine, the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. Her research interests are micronutrition and mitochondrial function, particularly studying inflammatory bowel diseases, obesity and fungi infection.