Age-Related Topographical Metabolic Signatures for the Rat Gastrointestinal Contents

It is now known that human body harbors trillions of microbes mainly in the gastrointestinal tract with thousands of different species. Gut microbiota not only functions in the development of the immune system, food digestion and absorption,  but also affects and even is involved in the host metabolic regulations such as drug and bile acid metabolisms. The communal compositions of gut microbiota vary with growth development and most likely the gastrointestinal topography as well to facilitate the functions of different intestinal regions. Therefore, information of the gut microbiota metabolism and its variations in different intestinal regions is essential for understanding the topographical or compartmentational aspects of the gut microbiota and host cometabolisms. Such information is also vital for understanding the mechanistic aspects of microbiome contributions to the normal physiology of hosts and for developing new therapeutic strategies thus for maintaining health and disease preventions. However, both the microbial ecology and the gut microbiota metabolisms in different intestinal regions are not fully understood so far and it is not possible to isolate and culture all these microbiota externally.
The group of Tang Huiru of WIPM recently made encouraging progress in this regard. Ph. D. Tian systematically characterized the metabolite compositional variations of the contents in rat jejunum, ileum, cecum, and colon for two age-groups using 1H NMR spectroscopy and multivariate analysis.The variations of these metabolite profiles of intestinal contents were dependent on the topographical locations of the gastrointestinal tract and animal age. The results have been published in the Journal of Proteome Research (2012, 11:1397-1411) http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr2011507.