6α-hydroxylated bile acids mediate TGR5 signalling to improve glucose metabolism upon dietary fiber supplementation in mice.

OBJECTIVE: Dietary fibres are essential for maintaining microbial diversity and the gut microbiota can modulate host physiology by metabolising the fibres. Here, we investigated whether the soluble dietary fibre oligofructose improves host metabolism by modulating bacterial transformation of secondary bile acids in mice fed western-style diet. DESIGN: To assess the impact of dietary fibre supplementation on bile acid transformation by gut bacteria, we fed conventional wild-type and TGR5 knockout mice western-style diet enriched or not with cellulose or oligofructose. In addition, we used germ-free mice and in vitro cultures to evaluate the activity of bacteria to transform bile acids in the caecal content of mice fed with western-style diet enriched with oligofructose. Finally, we treated wild-type and TGR5 knockout mice orally with hyodeoxycholic acid to assess its antidiabetic effects. RESULTS: We show that oligofructose sustains the production of 6α-hydroxylated bile acids from primary bile acids by gut bacteria when fed western-style diet. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that the effects of oligofructose on 6α-hydroxylated bile acids were microbiota dependent and specifically required functional TGR5 signalling to reduce body weight gain and improve glucose metabolism. Furthermore, we show that the 6α-hydroxylated bile acid hyodeoxycholic acid stimulates TGR5 signalling, in vitro and in vivo, and increases GLP-1R activity to improve host glucose metabolism. CONCLUSION: Modulation of the gut microbiota with oligofructose enriches bacteria involved in 6α-hydroxylated bile acid production and leads to TGR5-GLP1R axis activation to improve body weight and metabolism under western-style diet feeding in mice.

Antioxidants Promote Intestinal Tumor Progression in Mice.

Dietary antioxidants and supplements are widely used to protect against cancer, even though it is now clear that antioxidants can promote tumor progression by helping cancer cells to overcome barriers of oxidative stress. Although recent studies have, in great detail, explored the role of antioxidants in lung and skin tumors driven by RAS and RAF mutations, little is known about the impact of antioxidant supplementation on other cancers, including Wnt-driven tumors originating from the gut. Here, we show that supplementation with the antioxidants N-acetylcysteine (NAC) and vitamin E promotes intestinal tumor progression in the ApcMin mouse model for familial adenomatous polyposis, a hereditary form of colorectal cancer, driven by Wnt signaling. Both antioxidants increased tumor size in early neoplasias and tumor grades in more advanced lesions without any impact on tumor initiation. Importantly, NAC treatment accelerated tumor progression at plasma concentrations comparable to those obtained in human subjects after prescription doses of the drug. These results demonstrate that antioxidants play an important role in the progression of intestinal tumors, which may have implications for patients with or predisposed to colorectal cancer.

The acute effect of metabolic cofactor supplementation: a potential therapeutic strategy against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

The prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) continues to increase dramatically, and there is no approved medication for its treatment. Recently, we predicted the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in the progression of NAFLD using network analysis and identified metabolic cofactors that might be beneficial as supplements to decrease human liver fat. Here, we first assessed the tolerability of the combined metabolic cofactors including l-serine, N-acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC), nicotinamide riboside (NR), and l-carnitine by performing a 7-day rat toxicology study. Second, we performed a human calibration study by supplementing combined metabolic cofactors and a control study to study the kinetics of these metabolites in the plasma of healthy subjects with and without supplementation. We measured clinical parameters and observed no immediate side effects. Next, we generated plasma metabolomics and inflammatory protein markers data to reveal the acute changes associated with the supplementation of the metabolic cofactors. We also integrated metabolomics data using personalized genome-scale metabolic modeling and observed that such supplementation significantly affects the global human lipid, amino acid, and antioxidant metabolism. Finally, we predicted blood concentrations of these compounds during daily long-term supplementation by generating an ordinary differential equation model and liver concentrations of serine by generating a pharmacokinetic model and finally adjusted the doses of individual metabolic cofactors for future human clinical trials.