Our Lab’s first paper!!! Dietary sphingolipids are selectively assimilated by members of the mammalian gut microbiome for their own metabolism. Congratulations Min-Ting and Henry!

Our lab’s first research paper is now published at the Journal of Lipid Research! In this paper we’ve addressed a burning question in the lab – do members of the gut microbiome use dietary sphingolipids for their own metabolism. It turns out that they do and that microbes that can synthesize sphingolipids (Bacteroides, Prevotella) are the dominant genera interacting with dietary sphingolipids. Other notable sphingolipid-interacting microbes include Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus. These observations were possible through our development of a new workflow that we titled BOSSS – BioOrthogonal labeling Sort Seq Spec – that allows for the tracing of almost any nutrient into the gut microbial metabolome (see figure below). Specifically, you can understand which species is taking up your nutrient of interest and what they are doing with this nutrient.

Bioorthogonal labeling-Sort-Seq-Spec (BOSSS) workflow. (A) An alkyne containing lipid was introduced to either the Bacteroides thetaiotamicron (B. theta) cultures (palmitic acid alkyne, PAA) or to mice by oral gavage (sphinganine alkyne, SAA). (B) B. theta labeled with PAA (B. thetaPAA) was collected after a 24-hour incubation and the cecal content from mice was harvested after oral administration of SAA for five consecutive days. (C) Sphingolipid-interacting bacteria were fluorescently detected with Alexa Fluor 647 azide using click chemistry. (D) Sphingolipid-interacting versus non-interacting bacteria were separated using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). (E) Species composition of interacting versus non-interacting bacteria was determined by 16S sequencing. The metabolic consequences of PAA and SAA exposure were determined by differential metabolomic analysis. (From: Lee, Min-Ting et al. “Dietary sphinganine is selectively assimilated by members of the mammalian gut microbiome.” Journal of lipid research. 9 Jul. 2020, doi:10.1194/jlr.RA120000950)