Poster Presentations

Session Title: The Animal Microbiome
Presentation Date: Monday, August 18, 2008
Poster Board Number: 0375

METABOLIC PATHWAY ANALYSIS IN A CLOSED ECOSYSTEM, ANIMAL GUT

J. Kikuchi¹, M. Yuki², T. Nobori², S. Moriya^3
1RIKEN Plant Science Center, Advanced NMR Metabomics Research Unit, Yokohama, Japan, ²Yokohama City University, Environmental Molecular Biology Laboratory, Yokohama, Japan, ³RIKEN, Biosphere Oriented Bioscience Research Unit, Yokohama, Japan

Nutritional acquisition is a key issue in living system, and generally, animals strongly rely on .various metabolites passing through symbiotic organisms, such as gut microbiota. Recent meta-genomics approach proposed several indirect evidence of nutritional passing between different organisms, but more evident, direct observation of such biological event can open new era of meta-metabonomics. Here, we have chosen simple nutritional acquistion system, termite-gut microbiota, that strongly rely on plant biomass as their nutritional input as model study. We successfully observed metabolic flow between symbiont to host termite by use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis and stable isotope feeding made by ¹³C-labeled cellulose. Furthermore, NMR analysis of both acquisition of different ¹³C-sources and use of RNAi approach supported our metabolic pathway investigation. Therefore, this method opens the new horizon to understand the hidden and major part of biosphere.