Irene Miguel-Aliaga - The gut-brain connection

The gut is exposed to a great deal of internal information, such as nutrients and microbiota activity.

About Irene Miguel-Aliaga
"I am Professor of Genetics and Physiology at Imperial College London. I study how our internal organs change and affect us.

I am a geneticist and I run the Miguel-Aliaga Laboratory at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial. My team and I research organ plasticity: how and why organs that we commonly regard as fully-developed change in size or function, in response to environmental or internal challenges, mainly focusing on intestines and their neurons."

The gut-brain connection

Historically, we had a very top-down view of intelligence from the perspective of how we make decisions, or how we know, sense, and integrate information that leads to behavioural or physiological adaptations. We thought that there is this very clever brain that’s getting information from our environment, and that leads to physiological changes, and some of those will involve the intestine. So the brain will tell the intestine to do things.

But we’ve also known now for a long time that when you look at the nerves that connect the brain with the gut, most of the information goes from the gut to the brain. So 70% of the fibres or the connections between the two will go from the gut to the brain. Anatomically, that almost tells you that there has to be very extensive crosstalk; maybe there’s more going from the gut to the brain than from the brain to the gut.

Key Points

• The gut is exposed to a great deal of internal information, such as nutrients and microbiota activity.
• The gut sends many signals to the brain, including pleasant signals.
• In reproducing female fruit flies, nerve cells in the gut fire up and increase food intake; these otherwise silent cells are found in both males and females.