Location: Food Components and Health Laboratory
Project Number: 8040-51000-059-017-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Aug 13, 2022
End Date: Aug 12, 2023
Objective:
Obese individuals are known to have different relative abundances of gut microbes compared to lean individuals, and different microbiota are known to have different affinities for bile acids as substrates. Dietary interventions that affect gut microbiota would be expected to alter the conversion of primary bile acids to secondary bile acids. Secondary bile acids increase risk for cancer, thus improved dietary regulation of bile acid metabolism would be advantageous to health. The objective of this collaboration is to investigate the effect of obesity on formation of secondary bile acids in the GI tract, and to probe the potential for prebiotic dietary interventions to normalize the dysregulation of bile acid metabolism.
Approach:
The USDA Food Components and Health Lab has a sample bank of blood and feces from previous dietary intervention studies, with subjects over a broad body mass index range and from studies with different pre-biotic dietary interventions. Blood and fecal samples from adult study volunteers ranging in body mass index will undergo analysis for a panel of bile acids. The selected samples for this collaboration are from studies with interventions that would be expected to alter gut bile acid metabolism based on scientific literature. For this collaboration, bile acids in blood and feces will be associated with body mass index, then the effect of different dietary interventions on bile acid metabolism will be probed. The Food Components and Health Lab will seek additional funds to eventually extend these experiments to include metatranscriptomics on feces, if such funds can be identified.
