Mucin foraging enables Akkermansia muciniphila to compete against other microbes in the gut and to modulate host sterol biosynthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Akkermansia muciniphila, a prominent member of the gastrointestinal tract (GI) microbiota, uses mucins as a sole source of carbon and nitrogen. A. muciniphila is considered a next-generation probiotic because its abundance in humans positively correlates with protection from metabolic syndrome and obesity. However, A. muciniphila is intractable to genetic analysis and thus the molecular mechanisms underlying the metabolism of mucin, its colonization of the GI tract, and its impact on host physiology are poorly understood. Here, we developed and applied transposon mutagenesis to identify A. muciniphila factors important for the use of mucin and determined that mucin degradation products accumulate in internal compartments through a process that requires pili and a periplasmic protein complex. We further determined that the degradation of mucin and related proteoglycans is important for colonization of the GI by A. muciniphila but only in the context of competing microbes. In germ free mice, mucin use by A. muciniphila repressed the expression of host genes required for mevalonate and cholesterol biosynthesis in the colon, providing a molecular link between A. muciniphila metabolism of mucins, the regulation of lipid homeostasis and potential probiotic activities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".