Organ transplantation and gut microbiota: current reviews and future challenges.

Organ transplantation is often the only effective treatment for patients with end-stage diseases, such as heart, liver, kidney and small bowel failure and is carried out frequently worldwide. Still the post-transplantation complications remain health- and life-threatening outcome that needed to be resolved. With the rapid development of molecular technologies in recent years, more and more researchers realize that the gut microbiota may play a critical role in human diseases. The intestinal microbiome has been proved to provide a lot of functions to the host, such as digesting food, modulating metabolism, promoting angiogenesis and regulating the immune system. Several studies have investigated the alteration of intestinal microbiota in post-transplantation patients and observed significant changes in the intestinal microbiome compared to the pre-transplant condition. Due to the abovementioned features that the gut microbiota may be used in the prognosis of clinical outcome of organ transplantation. In addition, the FMT (fecal microbiota transplantation), probiotics and prebiotics as the newest therapy methods, effectiveness of which has been verified in some diseases, such as Clostridium difficile infection, inflammatory bowel disease and other chronic disorders, might be used as the prognosis tool in organ transplantation as well. The purpose of this present review is to elucidate the relationship between gut microbiota and organ transplantation as well as the potential use of new therapies like fecal microbiota transplantation, probiotic and prebiotic administration after the transplantation, and provide some ideas for future researches in field of organ transplantation.