Editorial Intestinal Microbiota as Modulators of the Immune System

Copyright © 2015 Borja Sánchez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The gastrointestinal immune system is exposed to a large amount of different products mainly innocuous (derived from “friendly ” bacteria and/or food antigens) but some-times also dangerous and infectious (as invading bacteria or viruses). Despite that, it is effective in discriminating between them and hence maintaining immune tolerance against the natural inhabitants of our gut, but initiating immune responses against the harmful invading microor-ganisms [1, 2]. In the last decades, the western lifestyle has seen an increase in the prevalence of immunoregulatory dis-orders which has been linked to changes in the microbiota composition due to the increased use of antibiotics and the absence of intestinal parasites as proposed in the “hygien