Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, carmen.chandler@csun.edu, (818) 677-2130
California State University, Northridge microbial ecologist Gilberto Flores has spent years working to unravel the mysteries of the human gut microbiome, with a focus on Akkermansia muciniphila, seen by many health food manufacturers as a “good” bacterium to add to their products to promote health.
Flores has received support from a Danish dairy and the National institutes of Health (NIH) to understand how Akkermansia interacts with components of both cows and human milk.
“Akkermansia is a gut bacterium that is now sold as a probiotic and there’s a lot of interest in it as a therapeutic for several diseases,” said Flores, who teaches in CSUN’s College of Science and Mathematics. “There’s been a lot of talk recently about Akkermansia, from news stories on NPR, to endorsements by Halle Berry on social media. While it’s being promoted as a next-generation probiotic, there’s still a lot to learn about their ecology including how it interacts with the other bacteria in our gut.”
What makes Akkermansia unique compared to other bacteria of the human gut, Flores said, is that while most of the bacteria in our gut kind of eat what we eat, “these guys eat what we produce.”
“The mucus layers that line and protect our intestines is their primary food source,” he said. “When pathogens do this, it’s associated with disrupting the barrier to invade the underlying tissues. But when Akkermansia do it, as long as we have a healthy diet, it results in maintaining the mucus barrier. There’s a positive feedback loop with them eating it and their waste product stimulating our cells to make more of it.”
Akkermansia play a role in every stage of human development, helping infants digest breastmilk and other nutrients to helping adults regulate blood glucose levels.
The NIH has awarded Flores a four-year grant to study how Akkermansia deconstruct human milk oligosaccharides — complex sugars found naturally in breast milk that act as prebiotics for beneficial gut bacteria and protect infants from infections.
“A lot of our understanding about the metabolism of human milk oligosaccharides by gut bacteria is known for another group of beneficial bacteria, Bifidobacteria,” Flores said. “We’re doing some experiments now where we’re competing Akkermansia with Bifidobacteria to determine how they may interact in the infant gut to promote health.”
The goal, he said, is to understand how Akkermansia may impact development of the infant gut microbiome.
“If Akkermansia is being used as a therapeutic — and some other probiotics are already being added to infant formula — then we need to understand the ecology of the system and what strategies would work best for potentially introducing Akkermansia,” Flores said.
Flores’s lab is also being supported by Arla Foods Ingredients, one of the largest dairy ingredients producers in the world, to study how Akkermansia interacts with milk ingredients.
“We are looking at certain components that are present in milk to see if those might be able to be used by Akkermansia,” he said. “Can they use them? What happens when Akkermansia are in a community with other organisms? Do they compete for these ingredients? Are they able to?” Flores said, adding, “As laboratory scientists, we sometimes forget that our gut microbiome is a complex community and there’s a lot going on there that we still don’t understand. But we are learning.”
