Project

Capturing the gut volatilome

To improve the health of the digestive tract, there is a growing interest in adopting dietary strategies that involve the consumption of non-digestible food components to modulate the resident gut microbiota. However, to design these diets, a mechanistic comprehension of the microbiota and its dynamics in relation to diet is essential. Discovering trends in gut-associated microbial volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in dependence of the fermented substrate can be an effective diagnostic tool for understanding gut homeostasis.

Aim
The objective of this research in to unveil the range of VOCs associated with gut microbiota and to correlated them with the pathways involved with their synthesis. Furthermore, the projects aim to assess the variability of these small molecules among different faecal donors. By applying state of the art analytical techniques in combination with chemometrics approaches, the research will give new insights into the dynamics of gut fermentation in relation to diet and donors. The goal is the development of automated sampling systems of in-vitro gut simulations that can be used to characterize the overall VOCs composition but also to assess the quantification and temporal profile description of specific molecules. Once the knowledge on gut volatilome is filled, rapid diagnoses, as well as the prospect of long-term population surveillance for early illness identification can be attempted, like for breath analysis, in which PTR-MS has already been used with a similar approach.

Approach
The gut ecosystem and its fermentation behaviour are monitored integrating state-of-art analytical methods such as Proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and Headspace Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (HS-GC-MS) coupled with modern static and dynamic in-vitro simulators of the gut ecosystem (e.g., SHIME).

References

  1. Ben de Lacy Costello et al. “A review of the volatiles from the healthy human body”. In: Journal of breath research 8.1 (2014), p. 014001.
  2. Henny Schwoebel et al. “Phase-resolved real-time breath analysis during exercise by means of smart processing of PTR-MS data”. In: Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry 401.7 (2011), pp. 2079–2091.
  3. Laura K Meredith and Malak M Tfaily. “Capturing the microbial volatilome: an oft overlooked’ome’”. In: Trends in microbiology (2022).
  4. Laure Weisskopf, Stefan Schulz, and Paolina Garbeva. “Microbial volatile organic compounds in intra-kingdom and inter-kingdom interactions”. In: Nature Reviews Microbiology 19.6 (2021), pp. 391–404.
  5. Michael Bunge et al. “On-line monitoring of microbial volatile metabolites by proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry”. In: Applied and environmental microbiology 74.7 (2008), pp. 2179–2186.