Meta’omic analysis of elite athletes identifies a performance-enhancing microbe that functions via lactate metabolism

By J. Scheiman, Jacob M. Luber, Theodore A. Chavkin, Tara L Macdonald, Angela Tung, L. Pham, Marsha C. Wibowo, Reneé C. Wurth, Sukanya Punthambaker, B. Tierney and 7 more. Nature Medicine, 2019

747 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The human gut microbiome is linked to many states of human health and disease1. The metabolic repertoire of the gut microbiome is vast, but the health implications of these bacterial pathways are poorly understood. In this study, we identify a link between members of the genus Veillonella and exercise performance. We observed an increase in Veillonella relative abundance in marathon runners postmarathon and isolated a strain of Veillonella atypica from stool samples. Inoculation of this strain into mice significantly increased exhaustive treadmill run time. Veillonella utilize lactate as their sole carbon source, which prompted us to perform a shotgun metagenomic analysis in a cohort of elite athletes, finding that every gene in a major pathway metabolizing lactate to propionate is at higher relative abundance postexercise. Using 13C3-labeled lactate in mice, we demonstrate that serum lactate crosses the epithelial barrier into the lumen of the gut. We also show that intrarectal instillation of propionate is sufficient to reproduce the increased treadmill run time performance observed with V. atypica gavage. Taken together, these studies reveal that V. atypica improves run time via its metabolic conversion of exercise-induced lactate into propionate, thereby identifying a natural, microbiome-encoded enzymatic process that enhances athletic performance. A closer look at the gut microbiome of elite marathon runners unveils a microbe-encoded enzymatic process that contributes to enhanced athletic performance.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01ba01b3125a1d47de807aba5ef45565d81d361c

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1. A. Marzec
2. Jakub Żółkiewicz
3. M. Ruszczyński
4. W. Feleszko

Citations in the corpus

• Postbiotics—A Step Beyond Pre- and Probiotics (2020, background): “A recent study in mice showed that the presence of bacteria of the genus Veillonella in the gut, which can metabolize lactic acid to propionate, significantly increased the animals’ physical performance [107].”