A convenient and versatile culturomics platform to expand the human gut culturome of Lachnospiraceae and Oscillospiraceae

What is it about?

The bacteria in our gut play an important role in maintaining health. In particular two families of bacteria, named Lachnospiraceae and Oscillospiraceae, have beneficial effects. These bacteria are interesting to investigate, because they are often less present in patients with certain diseases (e.g. Crohn’s disease) compared to healthy individuals. However, Lachnospiraceae and Oscillospiraceae are often poorly represented in collections. The main difficulties during isolation of these bacteria are the many conditions that are included to obtain them and the way to identify them. For example, isolated bacteria are identified based on their proteins by comparing them with proteins in a commercial available reference database, but this relies on the presence of the right reference proteins. This study uses a relatively simple medium for growing these bacteria by only changing one ingredient, a carbohydrate. In order to get a higher identification rate, this study also presents a reference database of gut bacteria-specific proteins, called ‘MaldiGut’. This database resulted in the identification of more than 82% of the isolated bacteria, compared to an identification of 31% with a commercial database. Therefore, the method used in this study will help to obtain more bacteria that could not be isolated before. This will enable more research into the understanding of the role of these bacteria in maintaining health, and provide new possible probiotics and therapies for patients.

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