Scientific recipes have been developed
to successfully grow and study gut bacteria in the lab Researchers report on the
nutritional preferences and growth characteristics of 96 diverse gut bacterial
strains. Their results will help scientists worldwide advance our understanding
of the gut microbiome.
The bacteria living in the gut have a
big impact on our health. But researchers still don't know what kind of food
most of our gut bacteria like to live on, or precisely how they metabolise
nutrients. The current paper reports on the growth characteristics of the main
human gut bacteria in nineteen different growth media with well-defined
recipes.
The research team selected 96 strains
from 72 bacterial species, representing the most frequently occurring and most
abundant species in the human gut plus important species linked to infectious
or other types of gut diseases, like colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel
disease (IBD). While characterising their nutritional preferences and ability
to produce various molecules, the researchers discovered unknown metabolic
features of some bacteria.
Furthermore, even closely related
bacteria sometimes had completely different nutritional preferences. This shows
that microbiologists can't base their assumptions about metabolic capabilities
on bacteria's genetic relationships alone.
The new scientific 'cookbook' is filled
with molecular recipes on how to grow gut bacteria, providing the community
with the tools for studying the structure and function of the human gut
microbiome.
Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle
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Pharmaceutical Microbiology