Complex Glycan Catabolism by the Human Gut Microbiota: The Bacteroidetes Sus-like Paradigm

By E. Martens, N. Koropatkin, T. Smith, Jeffrey I. Gordon. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2009

627 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Trillions of microbes inhabit the distal gut of adult humans. They have evolved to compete efficiently for nutrients, including a wide array of chemically diverse, complex glycans present in our diets, secreted by our intestinal mucosa, and displayed on the surfaces of other gut microbes. Here, we review how members of the Bacteroidetes, one of two dominant gut-associated bacterial phyla, process complex glycans using a series of similarly patterned, cell envelope-associated multiprotein systems. These systems provide insights into how gut, as well as terrestrial and aquatic, Bacteroidetes survive in highly competitive ecosystems.

Subfields: Food Science, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/499e6b58ae2434bdf3478ed4287d41bc78634920

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Citations in the corpus

Recognition and Degradation of Plant Cell Wall Polysaccharides by Two Human Gut Symbionts (2011, background): “Bacteroidetes from a variety of environments including the human gut employ a similar strategy for binding and degrading various glycans [9].”
Interactions between gut microbiota and host metabolism predisposing to obesity and diabetes. (2011, background): “thetaiotaomicron have been extensively studied and resemble those of the starch-utilization system (Figure 1b) (25).”
Environmental and Gut Bacteroidetes: The Food Connection (2011, background): “thetaiotaomicron, the Sus locus comprises eight genes, susRABCDEFG (Martens et al., 2009).”
Metabolic Reconstruction for Metagenomic Data and Its Application to the Human Microbiome (2012, background): “…close connections among these pathways, they show distinct patterns of relative abundance specific to the gut and covary at very low abundance in the oropharynx. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002358.g005 sulfates, is a component of dietary fiber and glycoproteins degraded by intestinal bacteria [42].”
Ecology of marine Bacteroidetes: a comparative genomics approach (2013, background): “thetaiotaomicron had a lower number of peptidases, since it is a polysaccharide specialist (Martens et al., 2009).”
Specificity of polysaccharide use in intestinal Bacteroides species determines diet-induced microbiota alterations (2010, positive): “Published surveys of Bt gene expression in numerous carbohydrates support that upregulation of the fructan PUL is specific to fructose-containing substrates (Martens et al., 2009; Sonnenburg et al., 2005).”
Mucin glycan foraging in the human gut microbiome (2015, background): “Starch utilization systems (Sus) or Sus-like proteins have been particularly well studied in B. thetaiotaomicron (Martens et al., 2009).”