The mammalian gut is an attractive model for exploring the general question of how habitat impacts the evolution of gene content. Therefore, we have characterized the relationship between 16 S rRNA gene sequence similarity and overall levels of gene conservation in four groups of species: gut specialists and cosmopolitans, each of which can be divided into pathogens and non-pathogens. At short ...

Symbiotic bacteria often help their hosts acquire nutrients from their diet, showing trends of co-evolution and independent acquisition by hosts from the same trophic levels. While these trends hint at important roles for biotic factors, the effects of the abiotic environment on symbiotic community composition remain comparably understudied. In this investigation, we examined the influence of a...

Unbalanced dietary habits and gut dysmotility are causative factors in metabolic and functional gut disorders, including obesity, diabetes, and constipation. Reduction in luminal butyrate synthesis is known to be associated with gut dysbioses, and studies have suggested that restoring butyrate formation in the colon may improve gut health. In contrast, shifts in different types of gut microbiot...

The formation and regulation of vertebrate endogenous intestinal microbiota has been widely studied as the microbiota plays a crucial role in the host nutrition, development, and health. Despite the importance of microbiota for host health, it is still unclear whether the endogenous intestinal microorganisms are genetically distinct or whether they are genetically related with each other in dif...

Aiming at learning the association between the gut microbiota and termites with different diet habits and phylogenetic positions, the gut bacteria of three populations for each of the two higher termites (wood-feeding Mironasutitermes shangchengensis and fungus-feeding Odontotermes formosanus) and two wood-feeding lower termites (Tsaitermes ampliceps and Reticulitermes flaviceps) were analyzed ...

Mean pH values in pooled samples of foregut, midgut, and hindgut from adult Melanoplus sanguinipes, which had been raised in the laboratory on barley shoots and wheat bran, were 5.15, 6.39, and 5.98, respectively. Homogenates of midgut/hindgut sections and frass (feces) yielded colony counts of bacteria by the spread plate method of 5.7 to 5.9 and 5.3 to 5.5 log(10) colonies per mg, respectivel...

OBJECTIVE The gut microbiota has been designated as an active regulator of glucose metabolism and metabolic phenotype in a number of animal and human observational studies. We evaluated the effect of removing as many bacteria as possible by antibiotics on postprandial physiology in healthy humans. METHODS Meal tests with measurements of postprandial glucose tolerance and postprandial release ...

The gut microbiome influences the development of the immune system of young mammals; the establishment of a normal gut microbiome is thought to be important for the health of the infant during its early development. As the role of bacteria in the causation of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is backed by strong evidence, the balance between host immunity and potential bacterial pathogens is ...

Human milk has been traditionally considered sterile; however, recent studies have shown that it represents a continuous supply of commensal, mutualistic and/or potentially probiotic bacteria to the infant gut. Culture-dependent and -independent techniques have revealed the dominance of staphylococci, streptococci, lactic acid bacteria and bifidobacteria in this biological fluid, and their role...

Long-term consumption of red meat has been considered a potential risk to gut health, but this is based on clinic investigations, excessive intake of fat, heme and some injurious compounds formed during cooking or additions to processed meat products. Whether intake of red meat protein affects gut bacteria and the health of the host remains unclear. In this work, we compared the composition of ...