[bioundgrd] FW: Tomorrow: Microbiome Club Seminar Prof Alex Kostic 4/23 at 5:30PM

[Joshua Stone]

From: Chelsea Catania <cataniac at mit.edu>
Subject: Tomorrow: Microbiome Club Seminar Prof Alex Kostic 4/23 at 5:30PM

MIT Microbiome Club
Faculty Seminar
[cid:DE188664-4E8D-43E8-AA08-7505B7991C01 at broadinstitute.org]
Prof. Alex Kostic
Performance-Enhancing Bugs: Exercise Physiology Meets the Gut Microbiome
Tuesday, April 23rd at 5:30PM in 56-614<https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=56>

The human gut microbiome encodes a vast metabolic repertoire, yet it is unknown whether it can impact exercise performance. To begin to address this question, we performed longitudinal metagenomic analysis on runners in the Boston Marathon to identify microbiome features associated with intense exercise. The strongest microbiome feature enriched post-marathon was an increase in the abundance of the bacterial genus Veillonella. We isolated Veillonella atypica directly from the marathon runners and found that inoculation in laboratory mice increased exhaustive treadmill runtime by 13% in a V. atypica-dependent manner. Veillonella utilize lactate as their sole carbon source, which prompted us to perform shotgun metagenomic analysis in a cohort of elite athletes, finding that every gene in a major pathway metabolizing lactate to propionate is at higher relative abundance post-exercise. Using 13C3-labeled lactate in mice we demonstrate that serum lactate crosses the epithelial barrier into the lumen of the gut. We also show that intrarectal instillation of propionate is sufficient to reproduce the increased treadmill runtime performance observed with V. atypica gavage. Taken together, these studies reveal that V. atypica improves runtime via its metabolic conversion of exercise-induced lactate into propionate, thereby identifying a natural, microbiome-encoded enzymatic process that enhances athletic performance.​

Biography: Professor Kostic's background and training is in computational biology, microbiology, and immunology. During his PhD thesis work with Matthew Meyerson and Wendy Garrett, he discovered an association between colorectal cancer and the gut microbiome constituent Fusobacterium nucleatum. He demonstrated that Fusobacterium accelerated intestinal tumorigenesis by a mechanism involving altered immune cell recruitment to the tumor, which he established after developing a mouse model with a humanized microbiome. As a postdoctoral fellow at Broad Institute working with Ramnik Xavier and Curtis Huttenhower, he worked to characterize the developing infant gut microbiome in dense, longitudinal metagenomic analyses of birth cohorts at risk for type 1 diabetes. He discovered a novel mechanism by which the human microbiome directly influences immune development and progression to type 1 diabetes. In his new lab, he focuses on simplified microbial communities in gnotobiotic mice to discover basic lines of microbiome-host communication necessary for homeostasis and that underlie autoimmune disease.​
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The MIT Microbiome Club, part of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, brings together inquisitive MIT undergrads, grad researchers, postdocs, faculty, and clinicians in the emerging field of microbiome studies and microbiome-based medicine. Learn more on our Facebook page. <https://www.facebook.com/MITmicrobiomeclub/> Or follow us on Twitter<https://twitter.com/MITubiomeclub>.

Chelsea Catania, Ph.D.
MIT Microbiome Club President
Postdoctoral Associate
Laboratory for Energy and Microsystems Innovation
Department of Mechanical Engineering
@MITubiomeclub<https://twitter.com/MITubiomeclub>

subscribe<http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/options/microbiome-club>


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