I also enjoyed the positive reaction in the room at #cshlmbiome to our "succinotypes", recently published in BMC Microbiome from the pharmabiome.com team (doi.org/10.1186/s401...). The bimodal partitioning of the succinate consumer guild never ceases to amaze me. Summary: bsky.app/profile/gabe...

What pleasure to participate at #cshlmbiome last week! The science was really excellent—deep thinkers that are going after mechanisms in microbiomes and not just descriptive associations. It's what we need to move the translational field forward.

Indeed, we looked at the association of succinotypes with different diseases and found that IBD patients are significantly more likely to have a D-succinotype compared to a P-type.

Going back to the consumption rate differences, we expected D succinotype microbiomes to consume succinate more slowly than P succinotypes, and amazingly D-types had higher fecal succinate concentrations than P-types!

If this grouping were relevant, we expected Phascolarctobacterium and Dialister to be anticorrelated across human gut microbiomes. This turned out to be clearly the case, with the two genera mutually exclusive in the vast majority of any fecal samples we could get our hands on.

Interestingly, while Phascolarctobacterium and Dialister directly consumed the supplied succinate, Flavonifractor had diauxic consumption, suggesting it had a preference for any other nutrients in the base medium over succinate.

We discovered these using our NicheMap approach doi.org/10.1101/2023..., where we observed that fecal microbiomes differ in terms of the rate at which they consumed succinate, and this rate correlated with three different bacterial genera: Phascolarctobacterium, Dialister, and Flavonifractor.