Suchergebnisse

Predicting the metabolic behavior of the human gut microbiota in different contexts is one of the most promising areas of constraint-based modeling. Recently, we presented a supra-organismal approach to build context-specific metabolic networks of bacterial communities using functional and taxonomic assignments of meta-omics data. In this work, this algorithm is applied to elucidate the metabolic changes induced over the first year after birth in the gut microbiota of a cohort of Spanish infants. We used metagenomics data of fecal samples and nutritional data of 13 infants at five time points. The resulting networks for each time point were analyzed, finding significant alterations once solid food is introduced in the diet. Our work shows that solid food leads to a different pattern of output metabolites that can be potentially released from the gut microbiota to the host. Experimental validation is presented for ferulate, a neuroprotective metabolite involved in the gut-brain axis. ; IA was supported by a Basque Government predoctoral grant (PRE_2017_2_0028). SP-B was supported by a Spanish Government predoctoral grant (FPU14/01192). This manuscript will form part of the doctoral thesis of SP-B conducted within the context of the "Nutrition and Food Sciences Programme" at the University of Granada. This work was supported by the EU Project STANCE4HEALTH (contract number 816303) and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain (BIO2016-77998-R, SAF2009-13032-C02-02, CSD2009-00006 and SAF2012-31187).