AI Insight
This study creates a comprehensive quantitative map of resources entering the human large intestine by integrating dietary data and physiological measurements across more than 30 resource types including carbohydrates, proteins, mucus, bile acids, and minerals. The analysis reveals that microbial growth in the gut is primarily limited by carbon availability for most people, while phosphorus becomes limiting for some individuals, and nitrogen is generally not limiting due to host urea recycling. The research also shows that while dietary protein provides sufficient amino acids for microbes, vitamin B12 (cobamide) must be predominantly produced by gut microbes themselves rather than obtained from diet.
Why it matters
This quantitative framework enables more accurate predictions of how diet influences gut microbiome composition and function, which could inform personalized nutrition strategies and therapeutic interventions. Understanding resource limitations helps explain why certain microbial species thrive or fail in different individuals and provides a foundation for engineering beneficial microbiome communities.
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⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
The microbial ecosystem in the human gut is fundamentally shaped by the resources it receives. Yet, while quantitative information is available for many individual resource fluxes, a comprehensive description of the overall resource landscape is lacking. Here, I systematically integrate physiological measurements and food composition data to map diet and digestion to the fluxes of more than 30 major resources entering the human large intestine, including carbohydrates, proteins, mucus, bile acids, ions, and electron acceptors. Applying this reconstruction across dietary variation in the U.S. population and analyzing the resulting influxes of biomass-forming elements, I find that microbial growth is carbon-limited for most individuals, whereas phosphorus is limiting for a subset; nitrogen, by contrast, is not limiting once host-derived urea recycling is accounted for. Resource supply also determines whether microbial auxotrophies impose physiological constraints. While amino acid dependencies can often be satisfied by protein-derived influx, characterized dietary cobamide influx is insufficient to account for the fecal cobamide pool, pointing to a much greater contribution from microbial production. Together, these results provide a quantitative resource landscape for the human gut, defining physiological constraints on microbial growth and providing a basis for predictive models of microbiome function and its impact on the host.
Source: Quantifying the Resource Landscape That Shapes the Human Gut Microbiome