Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
Humans and other animals may have a way to control the growth of gut microbes: Eat less protein.
That’s because protein contains nitrogen. And, it turns out, the amount of nitrogen in the diet of mice governed the growth of bacteria in the animals’ large intestine, researchers report October 29 in Nature Microbiology. The finding may help researchers learn how to manipulate the types and amounts of people’s gut bacteria, which can contribute to health and disease.
Researchers know that something must limit bacterial growth. “If not, we’d be a few feet deep in E. coli in a couple of days,” says Thomas Schmidt, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor not involved in the study.
But so far, scientists have had limited success controlling which microbes inhabit the colon. That may be because researchers were looking at the wrong nutrients, Schmidt says. Most, including Schmidt, have usually considered carbon — found in fiber, starch and sugars, for example — to be the most important nutrient microbes eat, he says. The new study suggests that other nutrients such as nitrogen may be as important, or even more important, for controlling bacterial growth.
Microbial ecologist Aspen Reese of Duke University knew that in most ecosystems, nitrogen, an essential building block of many biological molecules, is a limited resource.
“Nitrogen is pretty important and it’s pretty hard to come by,” she says. If the growth of organisms in other ecosystems is limited by the availability of nitrogen, perhaps bacteria in the intestines are also starving for nitrogen, she reasoned.Reese, currently at Harvard University, and her colleagues started by measuring carbon and nitrogen concentrations in the feces of 30 mammalian species. Herbivores had the highest carbon levels and the lowest nitrogen levels in their feces, the team found. Carbon was also the…
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