Genomics-Based Reconstruction and Predictive Profiling of Amino Acid Biosynthesis in the Human Gut Microbiome.

The human gut microbiota (HGM) have an impact on host health and disease. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins and peptides, also serving as precursors of many essential metabolites including nucleotides, cofactors, etc. Many HGM community members are unable to synthesize some amino acids (auxotrophs), while other members possess complete biosynthetic pathways for these nutrients (prototrophs). Metabolite exchange between auxotrophs and prototrophs affects microbial community structure. Previous studies of amino acid biosynthetic phenotypes were limited to model species or narrow taxonomic groups of bacteria. We analyzed over 2800 genomes representing 823 cultured HGM species with the aim to reconstruct biosynthetic pathways for proteinogenic amino acids. The genome context analysis of incomplete pathway variants allowed us to identify new potential enzyme variants in amino acid biosynthetic pathways. We further classified the studied organisms with respect to their pathway variants and inferred their prototrophic vs. auxotrophic phenotypes. A cross-species comparison was applied to assess the extent of conservation of the assigned phenotypes at distinct taxonomic levels. The obtained reference collection of binary metabolic phenotypes was used for predictive metabolic profiling of HGM samples from several large metagenomic datasets. The established approach for metabolic phenotype profiling will be useful for prediction of overall metabolic properties, interactions, and responses of HGM microbiomes as a function of dietary variations, dysbiosis and other perturbations.

Effect of resonance dipole-dipole interaction on spectra of adsorbed SF6 molecules.

Adsorption of SF6 on zinc oxide and on silicalite-1 was investigated by a combination of IR spectroscopy with the calculations of spectra by means of a modernized model, developed previously for liquids. Comparison of the experimental spectra and the results of modeling shows that the complex band shapes in spectra of adsorbed molecules with extremely high absorbance are due to the strong resonance dipole-dipole interaction (RDDI) rather that the surface heterogeneity or the presence of specific surface sites. Perfect agreement between calculated and observed spectra was found for ZnO, while some dissimilarity in band intensities for silicalite-1 was attributed to complicated geometry of molecular arrangement in the channels.