Project description:The indigenous human gut microbiota is a major contributor to the human superorganism with established roles in modulating nutritional status, immunity, and systemic health including diabetes and obesity. The complexity of the gut microbiota consisting of over 1012 residents and approximately 1000 species has thus far eluded systematic analyses of the precise effects of individual microbial residents on human health. In contrast, health benefits have been shown upon ingestion of certain so-called probiotic Lactobacillus strains in food products and nutritional supplements, thereby providing a unique opportunity to study the global responses of a gut-adapted microorganism in the human gut and to identify the molecular mechanisms underlying microbial modulation of intestinal physiology, which might involve alterations in the intestinal physico-chemical environment, modifications in the gut microbiota, and/or direct interaction with mucosal epithelia and immune cells. Here we show by transcriptome analysis using DNA microarrays that the established probiotic bacterium, L. plantarum 299v, adapts its metabolic capacity in the human digestive tract for carbohydrate acquisition and expression of exo-polysaccharide and proteinaceous cell surface compounds. This report constitutes the first application of global gene expression profiling of a gut-adapted commensal microorganism in the human gut. Comparisons of the transcript profiles to those obtained for L. plantarum WCFS1 in germ-free mice revealed conserved L. plantarum responses indicative of a core transcriptome expressed in the mammalian gut and provide new molecular targets for determining microbial-host interactions affecting human health. Hybridization of the samples against a common reference of gDNA isolated from L. plantarum 299v