Quantifying the daily harvest of fermentation products from the human gut microbiota
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The authors developed an integrative framework to quantify the daily turnover of fermentation products (FPs) from the human gut microbiota. They experimentally measured FP production and carbohydrate consumption rates for 16 common gut bacterial strains.
Using data on diet composition and digestion, they estimated the daily FP "harvest" for humans to be around 500 mmol/day for a 1970s British diet. Diet is the major factor determining total FP harvest, with fiber-rich diets yielding higher harvests. Microbiome composition impacts types of FPs produced but not total amount. Compared to mice, humans get a smaller fraction of daily energy from gut microbiota FPs (1.8-12% vs 21% for lab mice).
Knowing the FP dose absorbed by the host can help understand microbiota-host interactions and health effects. More quantitative analyses integrating microbiota metabolism, diet, and host physiology are needed. To scale analysis of the daily amount of fermentation product released by the gut microbiota and harvested by the human host. In summary, this paper provides a novel framework to quantify the key metabolic outputs of the gut microbiota, the fermentation products absorbed by the human host. It highlights the dominant role of diet in determining this microbial-host exchange. The approach can be extended to other metabolites and interactions.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.05.573977v1
