Abstract
The gut microbiota of individuals are dominated by different fiber-utilizing bacteria, which ferment dietary fiber into short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) known to be important for human health. Here, we show that the dominance of Prevotella versus Bacteroides in fecal innocula, identified into two different enterotypes, differentially impacts in vitro fermentation profiles of SCFAs from fibers with different chemical structures. In a microbiome of the Prevotella enterotype, fructooligosaccharides, and sorghum and corn arabinoxylans significantly promoted one single Prevotella OTU with equally high production of total SCFAs with propionate as the major product. Conversely, in the Bacteroides-dominated microbiota, the three fibers enriched different OTUs leading to different levels and ratios of SCFAs. This is the first report showing how individual differences in two enterotypes cause distinctly different responses to dietary fiber. Microbiota dominated by different fiber-utilizing bacteria may impact host health by way of producing different amounts and profiles of SCFAs from the same carbohydrate substrates.
Highlights
Human gut microbiota varies among individuals and the concept of “enterotypes” has been used to stratify people’s microbiota compositions
Since short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are biologically active compounds produced by fiber-utilizing bacteria, it becomes an interesting question whether different enterotypes produce different amounts and profiles of SCFAs from the same fiber substrates
The structural differences between the two arabinoxylans arise from branched structures where SAX has relatively uniform arabinose substitution on the xylan backbone and corn arabinoxyan (CAX) has a more complex array of sugars and linkage patterns (Fig. 1, Table S1)
Summary
We found that structurally different dietary fibers within the arabinoxylan fiber class were utilized differently using in vitro human fecal fermentation[11]. The microbiota compositions of these two donors were analyzed together with fecal microbiota sequences from a cohort of 54 healthy Chinese subjects and two disparate clusters were observed (Fig. 2B), which aligned with the Prevotella (D1) and Bacteroides (D2) enterotypes as put forth by Arumugam[1, 2] These two enterotypes were used to study how the two microbiota communities utilized the different fibers. The D2 Bacteroides enterotype microbiota showed differential fermentation of CAX and SAX with different SCFA outcomes. Kovatcheva-Datchary et al.[14] recently reported individuals with Prevotella-dominated gut microbiota responded to barley kernel bread supplementation with improved glucose tolerance This implies an enterotype-dependent beneficial effect of dietary fibers. It seems conceivable that with the accumulation of more information on how fibers affect different human gut microbiota, guidance for future personalized dietary fiber recommendations or therapies can be developed based on enterotypes
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