Unraveling the food web in your gut
Monday, June 13, 2016 - 10:00
in Biology & Nature
Despite recent progress, the organization and ecological properties of the intestinal microbial ecosystem remain under investigated. Using a manually curated metabolic module framework for (meta-)genomic data analysis, Sara Vieira-Silva, Gwen Falony and colleagues from the Jeroen Raes lab (VIB/KU Leuven) studied species-function relationships in gut microbial genomes and microbiomes. The team of the Flemish Gut Flora Project observed that half of the bacteria in the human gut were metabolic generalists, while others were specializing and feeding on specific substrates, such as carbohydrates, proteins, or lipids.