Monomethylmercury degradation by the human gut microbiota is stimulated by protein amendments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Monomethylmercury (MMHg) is a potent neurotoxicant that can be bioaccumulated and biomagnified through trophic levels. Human populations whose diets contain MMHg are at risk of MMHg toxicity. The gut microbiota was identified as a potential factor causing variation in MMHg absorption and body burden. However, little is known about the role of gut microbiota on Hg transformations. We conducted a series of in vitro experiments to study the effects of dietary nutrient change on Hg metabolism and the human gut microbiota using anoxic fecal slurry incubations. We used stable Hg isotope tracers to track MMHg production and degradation and characterized the microbiota using high throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. We show that the magnitude of MMHg degradation is individual dependent and rapidly responds to changes in nutrient amendments, leading to complete degradation of the MMHg present. Although the mechanism involved remains unknown, it does not appear to involve the well-known mer operon. Our data are the first to show a nutrient dependency on the ability of the simulated human gut microbiota to demethylate MMHg. This work provides much-needed insights into individual variations in Hg absorption and potential toxicity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".