It seems that the powers that be decided lactobacillus was getting a bit crowded and decided to split it into separate genuses.

From the article we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantarum and it’s apparently the most common fermenting bacteria for silage, and shows up in sauerkraut and kimchi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.

Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.

There are so many interesting metabolites that the gut microbiome produces that modulate the immune system. My former startup (Interface Biosciences) was trying to develop a process for identifying and developing these as traditional pharmaceuticals (e.g. small molecule drugs).

One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).

It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.

As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.

[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.

[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.

The paper has a critical statistical flaw buried in the methods: when their gut RNA-seq data showed no significant changes after proper FDR correction for multiple testing, they simply abandoned the correction and used P≤0.01 instead. This is textbook p-hacking.

While the multi-organ approach is interesting, this reads more like a fishing expedition that found patterns in noise rather than robust biological findings.

Supported by grants from NIH/NIAID Grants and the University of California Davis.

I'll drink to that!

10-HSA is a fatty-acid metabolite produced by Lactobacillus bacteria

Lactobacillus Plantarum is a super common probiotic that produces 10-HSA and other important metabolites

its commercial name is also known as lp299v which has been studied for decades, tons of studies

for example: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4344/10/2/154

lp299v is extreme safe and can be taken in mega-doses however it will not colonize in the GI so would have to be taken routinely