ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Infectious Agents and Disease
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1672770
This article is part of the Research TopicInfectious disease control in the microbial functional genomics eraView all 14 articles
Cellular Respiration and Amino Acid Metabolism Is Altered by Dietary Oligosaccharides in Salmonella with Epithelial Cell Association
Provisionally accepted
- School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis, Davis, United States
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Dietary prebiotic oligosaccharides, complex carbohydrates that support beneficial bacteria, are ubiquitous on marketplace shelves and in people's diets. Though widely accessible and consumed, little is known about how different prebiotics alter the epithelium and microbes during enteric infections. Here we show two structurally different prebiotic oligosaccharides, human milk oligosaccharides (HMO) and mannanoligosaccharides (MOS), alter the metabolism of colonic epithelial cells and Salmonella enterica sv. Typhimurium in ways specific to each prebiotic during infection. Initially, HMO and MOS addition decreased S. Typhimurium association with epithelial cells. However, gene expression analysis revealed significantly induced expression of Specific Pathogenicity Island (SPI) 1 (adj. P-value < 2.0-6) and 2 (adj. P-value < 3.0-5) with HMO treatment, opposed to increased fimbriae expression (adj. P-value < 3.0-3) with MOS treatment. Both host and pathogen metabolism were likewise altered with prebiotic addition. MOS treatment induced the expression of genes for amino acid metabolism in both the host cells and in S. Typhimurium, a metabolic shift that was not observed in the HMO treated cells. MOS treatment also altered pathogen-related respiration metabolism in S. Typhimurium towards activity typically seen during gut inflammation. The regulation of virulence expression in Salmonella from prebiotic treatment was unexpected and suggests prebiotics act in context-dependent ways to potentiate or attenuate enteric activity.
Keywords: Non-typhoidal infection, Prebiotics, Host association, Infectious Disease, nitrogen metabolism, sugarmetabolism
Received: 24 Jul 2025; Accepted: 16 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shaw, Chen, Arabyan and Weimer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bart C Weimer, bcweimer@ucdavis.edu
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