ASM Microbe presents research on benefits of protein-rich diets for gut microbiome functioning
19 Jun 2024 --- During the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Microbe annual meeting, a study was presented that offered insights into the effects of protein-rich diets on the gut microbiome and overall health. The research explores the impact of undigested protein in understanding protein intake in Western diets.
The study, of which only an abstract is currently available publicly, evaluated how excess undigested protein in the colon can be fermented to produce beneficial metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids, or lead to the production of harmful metabolites like ammonia and sulfides, which are linked to gastrointestinal disorders.
“These findings provide a crucial foundation for understanding how protein diets influence the gut microbiome and open doors for further investigations into the role of diet in promoting a healthy gut and overall health,” says Samson Adejumo, doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Illinois Chicago, US.
Meanwhile, a research team from Austria has provided conclusive evidence that eating fruit and vegetables contributes to bacterial diversity in the human microbiome, which is critical to good health. The sources of bacterial diversity have not been conclusive until now; however, diversity is known to be essential to human health.
Advancing microbial sciences
The ASM, composed of 36,000 scientists and health practitioners, is dedicated to the life sciences, advancing the microbial sciences. The study, “Acute supplementation of isonitrogenous protein diets differentially shapes the gut microbiome,” investigates the intricacies of how protein diets affect gut microbiome diversity and host body composition.
The scientists hypothesized that isonitrogenous protein diet supplementation changes the composition of the gut microbiota and positively impacts host body fitness. They conducted a series of experiments on mice, discovering that switching to a protein-rich diet led to significant weight loss, reduced body fat and induced immediate changes to the gut microbiome.
The researchers wanted to conduct a deeper analysis of the effects of amino acids on gut bacteria in protein-rich diets and led a four-week experiment with 16 mice. First, the mice were fed a standard chow diet for weeks, followed by isonitrogenous protein-rich diets for two weeks, which were enriched with either branched-chain or aromatic amino acids.
The study compared different protein diets to examine the effects of individual amino acids on the gut microbiome’s composition and activity. The mice consuming aromatic amino-acid-rich proteins had the most weight and fat mass loss compared to those on standard and branched-chain amino-acid-rich protein diets.
The researchers compared the microbial compositions across four protein groups.
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was performed weekly to measure body composition, and 16S rRNA sequencing was performed on the fecal genomic DNA. A random forest algorithm was used for protein type prediction, and Spearman correlation was used to determine the association between diets and the gut microbiome.
The random forest analysis yielded a classification accuracy of 97% in predicting protein sources, with UBA2730, Avispirillum, Eubacterium, Ureaplasma and Schaedlerella emerging as the top five genera for classifying protein sources. The Spearman correlation coefficient indicated a unique relationship between the relative abundance of gut microbiota and protein types.
Four protein groups
The comparison of microbial composition across the four protein groups revealed significantly different microbial taxa abundance and composition following protein enrichment. Using machine learning techniques, the researchers predicted protein diets based on gut microbial taxa, supporting the relationship between diet and microbiome changes.
The gut bacteria genera responded differently to dietary changes. The researchers note that while it is too early to state conclusively that protein diets are responsible for all the body composition changes and gut bacteria, the consistency of the changes indicates a connection between protein diets and gut bacteria alterations.
The findings underscore the importance of diet in shaping overall health and metabolic outcomes. The researchers recommend that future studies annotate the identified gut microbiome’s functional genes and metabolic pathways.
In other industry developments, researchers developed a new tool — microbeMASST — that instantly matches microbes to the metabolites they produce without prior knowledge, using a database of over 60,000 microorganisms. The tool aims to help scientists better understand the metabolism of microorganisms, as current techniques used to study this process make it difficult to decode microbe interactions and activities.
By Inga de Jong
