Project description:Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOS) are not digested in the proximal intestine. In distal intestine, HMOS collectively modify the microbiota, but the response of individual bacteria to individual components of the HMOS is not well defined. Here, each of 25 major isolates of the human intestinal microbiota was fed individual major fucosylated and sialylated HMOS in anaerobic culture. This allowed for an assessment of the influence of specific HMOS on the growth and metabolic products of individual microbiota bacteria. Most Bifidobacteria spp. and Bacteroides spp. grew, induced α-L-fucosidase activity, and produced abundant lactate or short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) when fed 2'-fucosyllactose (2'-FL), 3-FL, and lactodifucotetraose (LDFT). Lactobacillus delbrueckii ATCC7830, Enterococcus faecalis ATCC19433, and Streptococcus thermophilus ATCC19258 exhibited slight growth, pH reduction, and lactate production when supplemented with 2'-FL or 3-FL, but not LDFT. Supplementation with 3'-sialyllactose (3'-SL) and 6'-SL promoted moderate growth of Bifidobacterium longum JCM7007, 7009, 7010, 7011, 1272, 11347, ATCC15708, Bacteroides vulgatus ATCC8482, and B. thetaiotaomicron ATCC29148; accordingly, these bacteria exhibited greater neuraminidase activity and produced copious lactate, SCFA, or both. Lactobacillus delbrueckii ATCC7830 also consumed 6'-SL. In contrast, Clostridium spp., L. rhamnosus ATCC53103, E. faecalis ATCC29200, Staphylococcus spp., Enterobacter spp., and Escherichia coli K12 did not consume milk oligosaccharides nor produce appreciable acidic fermentation products. Specific Bifidobacteria and Bacteroides differentially digest specific individual HMOS, with the major fucosylated milk oligosaccharides most strongly stimulating key species of mutualist symbionts. This suggests strategies for treating dysbiosis of the microbiota and associated inflammatory disorders.
Project description:Human milk contains large amounts of complex oligosaccharides that putatively modulate the intestinal microbiota of breast-fed infants by acting as decoy binding sites for pathogens and as prebiotics for enrichment of beneficial bacteria. Several bifidobacterial species have been shown to grow well on human milk oligosaccharides. However, few data exist on other bacterial species. This work examined 16 bacterial strains belonging to 10 different genera for growth on human milk oligosaccharides. For this propose, a chemically defined medium, ZMB1, was used, which allows vigorous growth of a number of gut-related microorganisms in a fashion similar to complex media. Interestingly, Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis, Bacteroides fragilis , and Bacteroides vulgatus strains were able to metabolize milk oligosaccharides with high efficiency, whereas Enterococcus , Streptococcus , Veillonella , Eubacterium , Clostridium , and Escherichia coli strains grew less well or not at all. Mass spectrometry-based glycoprofiling of the oligosaccharide consumption behavior revealed a specific preference for fucosylated oligosaccharides by Bi. longum subsp. infantis and Ba. vulgatus. This work expands the current knowledge of human milk oligosaccharide consumption by gut microbes, revealing bacteroides as avid consumers of this substrate. These results provide insight on how human milk oligosaccharides shape the infant intestinal microbiota.
Project description:Newborns are colonized with an intestinal microbiota shortly after birth, but the factors governing the retention and abundance of specific microbial lineages are unknown. Nursing infants consume human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) that pass undigested to the distal gut, where they may be digested by microbes. We determined that the prominent neonate gut residents, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron and Bacteroides fragilis, induce the same genes during HMO consumption that are used to harvest host mucus glycans, which are structurally similar to HMOs. Lacto-N-neotetraose, a specific HMO component, selects for HMO-adapted species such as Bifidobacterium infantis, which cannot use mucus, and provides a selective advantage to B. infantis in vivo when biassociated with B. thetaiotaomicron in the gnotobiotic mouse gut. This indicates that the complex oligosaccharide mixture within HMOs attracts both mutualistic mucus-adapted species and HMO-adapted bifidobacteria to the infant intestine that likely facilitate both milk and future solid food digestion.
Project description:Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis (B. infantis) colonizes the infant gut microbiome with a 43-kb gene cluster that enables human milk oligosaccharide (HMO) utilization. Although there is relative genomic homogeneity in this regard, previous observations suggest that B. infantis strains may differ in their utilization phenotype. To test this hypothesis, a panel of B. infantis strains were evaluated for their ability to utilize pooled HMOs to yield differential phenotypes including biomass accumulation, HMO consumption glycoprofile, end-product secretion, and global transcriptomes. Two strains (ATCC 15697 and UMA301) efficiently consumed several HMO isomers/anomers that exhibit degrees of polymerization (DP) ³ 4. These same strains partially consumed the smaller DP HMOs including fucosyllactose and lactodifucotetraose isomers/anomers. In contrast, UMA299 efficiently utilized fucosylated small molecular weight HMOs (DP<4), and accumulated greater biomass on purified 2´FL with significantly higher 1,2-propanediol production. This study identifies several strain-dependent features in HMO utilization phenotypes that are consistent with metabolic variation within a bifidobacterial-dominated infant-gut microbiome.
Project description:The infant gut microbiome is impacted by early-life feeding, as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) found in breastmilk cannot be digested by infants and serve as nutrients for their gut bacteria. While the vast majority of HMO-utilization research has focused on Bifidobacterium species, recent studies have suggested additional HMO-utilizers, mostly Bacteroides, yet their utilization mechanism is poorly characterized. Here, we investigate Bacteroides dorei isolates from breastfed-infants and identify that polysaccharide utilization locus (PUL) 33 enables B. dorei to utilize sialylated HMOs. We perform transcriptional profiling and identity upregulated genes when growing on sialylated HMOs. Using CRISPR-Cas12 to knock-out four PUL33 genes, combined with complementation assays, we identify GH33 as the critical gene in PUL33 for sialylated HMO-utilization. This demonstration of an HMO-utilization system by Bacteroides species isolated from infants opens the way to further characterization of additional such systems, to better understand HMO-utilization in the infant gut.
Project description:The impact of commensal bacteria on the host arises from complex microbial-diet-host interactions. Mapping metabolic interactions in gut microbial communities is therefore key to understand how the microbiome influences the host. Here we use an interdisciplinary approach including isotope-resolved metabolomics to show that in Drosophila melanogaster, Acetobacter pomorum (Ap) and Lactobacillus plantarum (Lp) a syntrophic relationship is established to overcome detrimental host diets and identify Ap as the bacterium altering the host's feeding decisions. Specifically, we show that Ap uses the lactate produced by Lp to supply amino acids that are essential to Lp, allowing it to grow in imbalanced diets. Lactate is also necessary and sufficient for Ap to alter the fly's protein appetite. Our data show that gut bacterial communities use metabolic interactions to become resilient to detrimental host diets. These interactions also ensure the constant flow of metabolites used by the microbiome to alter reproduction and host behaviour.
Project description:Neonatal rotavirus infections are predominantly asymptomatic. While an association with gastrointestinal symptoms has been described in some settings, factors influencing differences in clinical presentation are not well understood. Using multidisciplinary approaches, we show that a complex interplay between human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), milk microbiome, and infant gut microbiome impacts neonatal rotavirus infections. Validating in vitro studies where HMOs are not decoy receptors for neonatal strain G10P[11], population studies show significantly higher levels of Lacto-N-tetraose (LNT), 2'-fucosyllactose (2'FL), and 6'-siallylactose (6'SL) in milk from mothers of rotavirus-positive neonates with gastrointestinal symptoms. Further, these HMOs correlate with abundance of Enterobacter/Klebsiella in maternal milk and infant stool. Specific HMOs also improve the infectivity of a neonatal strain-derived rotavirus vaccine. This study provides molecular and translational insight into host factors influencing neonatal rotavirus infections and identifies maternal components that could promote the performance of live, attenuated rotavirus vaccines.
Project description:Diet-microbe interactions play an important role in modulating the early-life microbiota, with Bifidobacterium strains and species dominating the gut of breast-fed infants. Here, we sought to explore how infant diet drives distinct bifidobacterial community composition and dynamics within individual infant ecosystems. Genomic characterisation of 19 strains isolated from breast-fed infants revealed a diverse genomic architecture enriched in carbohydrate metabolism genes, which was distinct to each strain, but collectively formed a pangenome across infants. Presence of gene clusters implicated in digestion of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) varied between species, with growth studies indicating that within single infants there were differences in the ability to utilise 2'FL and LNnT HMOs between strains. Cross-feeding experiments were performed with HMO degraders and non-HMO users (using spent or 'conditioned' media and direct co-culture). Further 1H-NMR analysis identified fucose, galactose, acetate, and N-acetylglucosamine as key by-products of HMO metabolism; as demonstrated by modest growth of non-HMO users on spend media from HMO metabolism. These experiments indicate how HMO metabolism permits the sharing of resources to maximise nutrient consumption from the diet and highlights the cooperative nature of bifidobacterial strains and their role as 'foundation' species in the infant ecosystem. The intra- and inter-infant bifidobacterial community behaviour may contribute to the diversity and dominance of Bifidobacterium in early life and suggests avenues for future development of new diet and microbiota-based therapies to promote infant health.
Project description:Understanding a complex microbial ecosystem such as the human gut microbiome requires information about both microbial species and the metabolites they produce and secrete. These metabolites are exchanged via a large network of cross-feeding interactions, and are crucial for predicting the functional state of the microbiome. However, till date, we only have information for a part of this network, limited by experimental throughput. Here, we propose an ecology-based computational method, GutCP, using which we predict hundreds of new experimentally untested cross-feeding interactions in the human gut microbiome. GutCP utilizes a mechanistic model of the gut microbiome with the explicit exchange of metabolites and their effects on the growth of microbial species. To build GutCP, we combine metagenomic and metabolomic measurements from the gut microbiome with optimization techniques from machine learning. Close to 65% of the cross-feeding interactions predicted by GutCP are supported by evidence from genome annotations, which we provide for experimental testing. Our method has the potential to greatly improve existing models of the human gut microbiome, as well as our ability to predict the metabolic profile of the gut.
Project description:Many gut microorganisms critical to human health rely on nutrients produced by each other for survival; however, these cross-feeding interactions are still challenging to quantify and remain poorly characterized. Here, we introduce a Metabolite Exchange Score (MES) to quantify those interactions. Using metabolic models of prokaryotic metagenome-assembled genomes from over 1600 individuals, MES allows us to identify and rank metabolic interactions that are significantly affected by a loss of cross-feeding partners in 10 out of 11 diseases. When applied to a Crohn's disease case-control study, our approach identifies a lack of species with the ability to consume hydrogen sulfide as the main distinguishing microbiome feature of disease. We propose that our conceptual framework will help prioritize in-depth analyses, experiments and clinical targets, and that targeting the restoration of microbial cross-feeding interactions is a promising mechanism-informed strategy to reconstruct a healthy gut ecosystem.