The microbiome is increasingly recognized as a central regulator of immune responses, influencing the onset and progression of autoimmune and autoinflammatory disorders across diverse tissues. Dysbiosis of the gut microbiota and its metabolome can have profound systemic effects, shaping immune responses in distant organs such as the lungs, joints, skin, kidneys, and central nervous system. This cross-organ communication is evident in diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Behçet’s disease, and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), where microbial imbalance and altered metabolite production contribute to aberrant immune activation and tissue damage.
This Research Topic aims to explore the mechanistic pathways through which microbial communities and their metabolites drive systemic immune dysregulation, with an emphasis on organ-to-organ communication. Key areas of interest include:
- How microbial metabolites such as short-chain fatty acids, bile acid derivatives, and tryptophan catabolites shape innate and adaptive immunity - How cytokines regulate barrier integrity and systemic inflammation. - How sex differences influence microbial–immune interactions across multiple organ systems.
By focusing on the gut’s ability to modulate distal immune responses, this collection will highlight the microbiome’s contribution to both autoimmune diseases, characterized by adaptive immune dysfunction, and autoinflammatory conditions, driven largely by innate immune pathways.
Contributions that integrate multi-omics approaches (such as microbiome and metabolome profiling, spatial and single-cell transcriptomics, and deep immunophenotyping) with mechanistic animal models or human translational studies will be encouraged. Together, these studies will provide a comprehensive view of how microbial dysbiosis and host immune signaling converge to influence systemic inflammatory disease, revealing biomarkers of disease progression and uncovering microbiome-based therapeutic opportunities.
Ultimately, this research topic aims to elucidate how gut-immune crosstalk across multiple tissues influences autoimmunity and autoinflammation, thereby paving the way for innovative interventions that target microbes, metabolites, and host pathways.
Article types accepted for submission: original research, systematic reviews, methods articles, data reports, and clinical trials.
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Article types
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
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