Personalized Response of Parkinson’s Disease Gut Microbiota to Nootropic Medicinal Herbs In Vitro: A Proof of Concept
Authors
Christine Peterson
Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92023, USA
Stanislav Iablokov
Phenobiome Inc., Palm Springs, CA 92262, USA; [email protected]
Dmitry Rodionov
Bioinformatics and Structural Biology Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA; [email protected]
Scott Peterson
Tumor Microenvironment and Cancer Immunology Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA; [email protected]
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons. Although the etiology of PD remains elusive, it has been hypothesized that initial dysregulation may occur in the gastrointestinal tract and may be accompanied by gut barrier defects. A strong clinical interest in developing therapeutics exists, including for the treatment of gut microbiota and physiology. We previously reported the impact of healthy fecal microbiota anaerobic cultures supplemented with nootropic herbs. Here, we evaluated the effect of nootropic Ayurvedic herbs on fecal microbiota derived from subjects with PD in vitro using 16S rRNA sequencing. The microbiota underwent substantial change in response to each treatment, comparable in magnitude to that observed from healthy subjects. However, the fecal samples derived from each participant displayed unique changes, consistent with a personalized response. We used genome-wide metabolic reconstruction to predict the community’s metabolic potential to produce products relevant to PD pathology, including SCFAs, vitamins and amino acid degradation products. These results suggest the potential value of conducting in vitro cultivation and analyses of PD stool samples as a means of prescreening patients to select the medicinal herbs for which that individual is most likely to respond and derive benefit.
Keywords: gut microbiota, Ayurveda, nootropic herbs, personalized medicine, Parkinson’s disease, genome-wide metabolic reconstruction, metagenomics
Author Biographies
Christine Peterson, Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92023, USA
Stanislav Iablokov, Phenobiome Inc., Palm Springs, CA 92262, USA; [email protected]
Data curation, Writing – review & editing
Dmitry Rodionov, Bioinformatics and Structural Biology Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA; [email protected]
Methodology, Data curation, Funding acquisition
Scott Peterson, Tumor Microenvironment and Cancer Immunology Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA; [email protected]
Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
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