Highlights
•Gut microbes show a dichotomy in ecological strategy for access to nitrogen
•Beneficial microbes are overrepresented in the endogenous N source guild
•Diets that reduce availability of dietary N to microbes promote healthy aging
•Diet impact on host-microbiome interaction can be simplified for modeling
Summary
Diet influences health and patterns of disease in populations. How different diets do this and why outcomes of diets vary between individuals are complex and involve interaction with the gut microbiome. A major challenge for predicting health outcomes of the host-microbiome dynamic is reconciling the effects of different aspects of diet (food composition or intake rate) on the system. Here we show that microbial community assembly is fundamentally shaped by a dichotomy in bacterial strategies to access nitrogen in the gut environment. Consequently, the pattern of dietary protein intake constrains the host-microbiome dynamic in ways that are common to a very broad range of diet manipulation strategies. These insights offer a mechanism for the impact of high protein intake on metabolic health and form the basis for a general theory of the impact of different diet strategies on host-microbiome outcomes.
Read At: Cell Metabolism
