A new mathematical model for the interaction of bacteria in the gut could help design new probiotics and specially tailored diets to prevent diseases.

«Intestinal bacteria have an important role to play in health and the development of diseases, and our new mathematical model could be extremely helpful in these areas,» says Jens Nielsen, Professor of Systems Biology at Chalmers, who led the research.

The new paper describes how the mathematical model performed when making predictions relating to two earlier clinical studies, one involving Swedish infants, and the other adults in Finland with obesity.

The studies involved regular measurements of health indicators, which the researchers compared with the predictions made from their mathematical model — the model proved to be highly accurate in predicting multiple variables, including how a switch from liquid to solid food in the Swedish infants affected their intestinal bacterial composition.

They also measured how the obese adults’ intestinal bacteria changed after a move to a more restricted diet. Again, the model’s predictions proved to be reliably accurate.

«These are very encouraging results, which could enable computer-based design for a very complex system. Our model could therefore be used to for creating personalised healthy diets, with the possibility to predict how adding specific bacteria as novel probiotics could impact a patient’s health,» says Jens Nielsen.

Story Source: Materials provided by Chalmers University of Technology. Original written by Susanne Nilsson Lindh and Joshua Worth. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.