Study finds how intestinal bacteria effects growth of fungi

JENA (Germany): The bacteria in the gut offer information about the number of potentially harmful Candida fungus present. Surprisingly, lactic acid bacteria are among them, which are renowned for their potential to protect against fungal illnesses.

The Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) and its Danish and Hungarian researchers have added another jigsaw piece to the puzzle of understanding the human gut microbiome.

The human gut microbiome is a very complex ecosystem in which numerous bacteria interact with one another. Individual species can spread and cause illness if there is an imbalance caused by drugs or other environmental factors. Candida fungus, for example, are prevalent in many healthy people’s intestines. Although they are typically innocuous, they have the potential to cause devastating systemic infections.

Studying these interactions in the intestine is difficult. The several hundred species of bacteria and fungi can only be partially cultivated in the laboratory, and many are not even known. Researchers at the Leibniz-HKI are therefore trying to shed more light on the intestine using metagenome studies.

For the study now published in Nature Communications, the researchers examined stool samples from 75 cancer patients and found that certain bacterial species always appear in greater numbers when the amount of fungi from the Candida genus is also high. “With these data, we developed a computer model that was able to predict the amount of Candida in another group of patients with an accuracy of about 80 percent based on bacterial species and amounts alone,” explained Bastian Seelbinder, lead author of the study. These bacteria included mainly oxygen-tolerant species.

Seelbinder conducts research in Gianni Panagiotou’s Microbiome Dynamics department at Leibniz-HKI, which focuses intensively on the gut microbiome. What surprised the researchers was not only how successful the prediction of the amount of fungi based on the bacterial species present was, but also which bacteria correlated with high amounts of fungi. “We found an increased number of bacterial species that produce lactic acid, including Lactobacillus species,” Seelbinder explains. It’s a finding he had not expected. “I could hardly believe it at first, so I checked several times, always with the same result.”

The reason for his surprise: Several studies have attested to the protective effect of lactic acid bacteria against fungal infections. One of them was published last year by Panagiotou’s group, also in the journal Nature Communications. “The result shows once again how complex the human gut microbiome is and how difficult it is to decipher the interactions of different microorganisms,” Panagiotou said.

The researchers’ hunch: Lactic acid bacteria, particularly of the genus Lactobacillus, favor Candida proliferation but at the same time make the fungus less virulent. This could be due to the fact that Candida species can switch their metabolism to be able to use the lactate produced by lactic acid bacteria. This gives them a competitive advantage over other fungi such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as the researchers discovered in additional experiments. However, the metabolic switch also apparently causes Candida to remain in its usually harmless spherical yeast form instead of forming fungal hyphae that could invade the intestinal mucosa.

“There is also a suggestion that certain groups of Lactobacillus species might have different effects,” Seelbinder said. To investigate this, the next step will be to perform more detailed genomic analyses of the bacteria.

“For the current study, we examined stool samples from cancer patients who are particularly at risk for fungal infections,” Panagiotou explains. For further studies, samples from healthy subjects could be included to develop long-term strategies for at-risk patients based on their microbiome.