Alteration of Community Metabolism by Prebiotics and Medicinal Herbs
This article explores the impact of prebiotics and medicinal herbs on gut microbial communities and their potential to confer positive health benefits to the host. We examined the metabolic capabilities of gut microbes in response to different prebiotic fibers and medicinal herbs, considering factors such as sugar composition and sugar linkages.
Gut microbes have evolved to efficiently utilize available energy sources through cooperative cross-feeding activities, maintaining a stable microbial community structure and gut ecosystem homeostasis. The functional diversity and specificities of carbohydrate-active enzymes encoded by gut microbiomes remain partially unknown, with different species and strains exhibiting varying glycan metabolism capacities.
Our study analyzed prebiotic fibers and medicinal herbs to understand how variations in sugar linkages and composition influence microbial community structure and function. Results indicated that sugar composition and linkages significantly influenced community β-diversity. Prebiotics with similar sugar content and identical linkages showed similar effects on gut community structure.
Taxonomic analysis revealed that certain families and genera, such as Enterobacteriaceae and Bifidobacterium, responded differently to prebiotics and medicinal herbs. Additionally, we predicted the presence of specific sugar linkages in medicinal herbs based on the microbial response.
Furthermore, prebiotic supplementation led to significant changes in glycosyl hydrolases (GHs) representation, fermentation pathways, and vitamin biosynthetic pathways in the gut microbiota. However, it was challenging to identify specific patterns correlating GHs and metabolic pathways with sugar composition or linkages.
The study highlights the potential of prebiotics and medicinal herbs to modulate gut microbiota and the importance of understanding the impact of different sugars on community structure. While the findings are based on in vitro cultures and may not fully reflect in vivo responses, they provide valuable insights into selecting microbiota modulators to achieve desired microbial configurations. Further research is needed to investigate these effects in more complex in vivo models and human studies.
The full peer-reviewed study was published by Peterson et. al. 2023 in Microorganisms: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/11/4/868
