MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4406599477 · doi:10.1101/2025.01.19.633601

Engineered spermidine-secreting <i>Saccharomyces boulardii</i> ameliorate colitis and colon cancer in mice

2025· preprint· en· W4406599477 on OpenAlex
Mahdi Mohaqiq, Roger Palou, Ruizhen Li, Guijun Zhang, Het Vaishnav, Florance Parweez, Terence Moyana, Damian M. Carragher, D. William Cameron, Tim Ramsay, Almer M. van der Sloot, Sanjay K. Murthy, Brian K. Coombes, Mike Tyers

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicBiopolymer Synthesis and Applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of OttawaMcMaster UniversityUniversity of TorontoMila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence InstituteSickKids FoundationHospital for Sick ChildrenOttawa Hospital
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSaccharomyces boulardiiColitisSpermidineColorectal cancerSaccharomyces cerevisiaeMedicineMicrobiologyCancerGastroenterologyYeastBiologyInternal medicineBiochemistryProbioticGeneticsEnzymeBacteria

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Experimental studies suggest that the probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii can mitigate the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease. However, these results are equivocal and S boulardii probiotic therapy has not gained widespread acceptance in clinical practice. To assess whether the therapeutic properties of S boulardii might be improved upon, we engineered S boulardii to overproduce and secrete spermidine, a pro-regenerative natural metabolite. We employed CRISPR gene deletion and transposon-mediated gene integration to manipulate expression of key enzymes in the polyamine synthetic and transport pathways. We tested the engineered yeast by oral gavage of mice treated with azoxymethane and dextran sulfate sodium to induce chronic colitis and colon cancer. We demonstrate that oral delivery of spermidine-secreting S boulardii in mice populates the gastrointestinal tract with viable spermidine-secreting S boulardii cells and raises free spermidine levels in the gastrointestinal tract. Strikingly, spermidine-secreting S boulardii strains were significantly more effective than wild-type S boulardii in reducing dextran sulfate sodium-induced colitis as well as colitis-associated colon cancer in mice. These results suggest that in situ spermidine secretion by engineered synthetic biotic yeast strains may be an effective and low-cost therapy to mitigate inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.028
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.227
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it