Bacteria of the human gut microbiome catabolize red seaweed glycans with carbohydrate-active enzyme updates from extrinsic microbes.

ABSTRACT: Humans host an intestinal population of microbes--collectively referred to as the gut microbiome--which encode the carbohydrate active enzymes, or CAZymes, that are absent from the human genome. These CAZymes help to extract energy from recalcitrant polysaccharides. The question then arises as to if and how the microbiome adapts to new carbohydrate sources when modern humans change eating habits. Recent metagenome analysis of microbiomes from healthy American, Japanese, and Spanish populations identified putative CAZymes obtained by horizontal gene transfer from marine bacteria, which suggested that human gut bacteria evolved to degrade algal carbohydrates-for example, consumed in form of sushi. We approached this hypothesis by studying such a polysaccharide utilization locus (PUL) obtaine

SUBMITTER: Hehemann JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3511707 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature