Cell Reports
Volume 26, Issue 13, 26 March 2019, Pages 3772-3783.e6
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Simplified Intestinal Microbiota to Study Microbe-Diet-Host Interactions in a Mouse Model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.02.090Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Mice are colonized with ten bacterial strains to create a simple human microbiota model

  • Dietary changes alter colonization patterns of the simplified intestinal microbiota (SIM)

  • SIM-diet interactions affect some circulating metabolites in the host

  • The SIM affects host metabolism in a diet-specific manner

Summary

The gut microbiota can modulate human metabolism through interactions with macronutrients. However, microbiota-diet-host interactions are difficult to study because bacteria interact in complex food webs in concert with the host, and many of the bacteria are not yet characterized. To reduce the complexity, we colonize mice with a simplified intestinal microbiota (SIM) composed of ten sequenced strains isolated from the human gut with complementing pathways to metabolize dietary fibers. We feed the SIM mice one of three diets (chow [fiber rich], high-fat/high-sucrose, or zero-fat/high-sucrose diets [both low in fiber]) and investigate (1) how dietary fiber, saturated fat, and sucrose affect the abundance and transcriptome of the SIM community, (2) the effect of microbe-diet interactions on circulating metabolites, and (3) how microbiota-diet interactions affect host metabolism. Our SIM model can be used in future studies to help clarify how microbiota-diet interactions contribute to metabolic diseases.

Keywords

microbiota
diet
transcriptome
metabolome

Cited by (0)

6

Present address: CAS Key Laboratory of Separation Science for Analytical Chemistry, Scientific Research Center for Translational Medicine, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian, 116023 China

7

Present address: Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR 72205, USA

8

These authors contributed equally

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