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 Probiotics and prebiotics, dietary supplements that promote growth of beneficial bacteria, could help prevent diseases such as salmonellosis. Knowing what sorts of fatty acids occur naturally in the intestine and understanding their effects on Salmonella will likely be of practical importance.
Now Craig Altier of the College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., et al. show that the murine small intestine, used as a model for salmonellosis, harbors a microbiota that is very different from that in the large intestine and that there is great diversity among the species in close association with the intestinal wall. They found further that streptomycin, which exacerbates salmonellosis, greatly alters the microbial flora, suggesting, as previously suspected, that the native ecology is protective, says Altier. "We also found that the large and small intestine contain different types and amounts of fatty acids, the waste products of microbial fermentation." Fatty acids are known to influence expression of Salmonella virulence genes, and "this finding suggests that the pathogen might use these metabolites to identify the specific regions of the intestinal tract that it targets for virulence. Our next effort is to determine how fatty acids repress Salmonella virulence."
(C. D. Garner, D. A. Antonopoulos, B. Wagner, G. E. Duhamel, I. Keresztes, D. A. Ross, V. B. Young, and C. Altier. 2009. Perturbation of the small intestine microbial ecology by streptomycin alters pathology in a Salmonella enterica serovar typhimurium murine model of infection. Infect. Immun. 77:2691-2702.)
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