Gut bacteria don't control how fast food moves through your body
A new study challenges the assumption that individual differences in digestion speed are driven by microbiota composition. Researchers transplanted gut bacteria from donors with different transit times into germ-free mice and found no effect on recipient digestion rates—suggesting other biological factors, not bacterial makeup, control this trait. The finding could reshape how companies approach microbiota-based therapeutics and personalized medicine strategies.
Originaltitel: Intestinal transit time phenotype is not transferred through gut microbiota transplantation
205 min, 95% CI: ±52) corresponding to reductions of approximately 45% in each group, supporting previous findings that the mere presence of a gut microbiota reduces TT. However, we found no differences in TT between the two recipient groups. In the second experiment, we transplanted two groups of female GF C57Bl/6J mice with cecal material from two different conventional C57Bl/6J mouse donor groups treated with the TT-increasing drug loperamide or a saline vehicle. Again, no differences in TT were observed between the two recipient groups. These findings indicate that either the transferred microbiota did not engraft effectively, or that gut microbiota composition itself is not the principal driver of inter-individual TT variation.