A Method to Assess Bacteriocin Effects on the Gut Microbiota of Mice

Summary

Bacteriocins are believed to play a key role in defining microbial diversity in different ecological niches. Here, we describe an efficient procedure to assess how bacteriocins affect gut microbiota composition in an animal model.

Abstract

Very intriguing questions arise with our advancing knowledge on gut microbiota composition and the relationship with health, particularly relating to the factors that contribute to maintaining the population balance. However, there are limited available methodologies to evaluate these factors. Bacteriocins are antimicrobial peptides produced by many bacteria that may confer a competitive advantage for food acquisition and/or niche establishment. Many probiotic lactic acid bacteria (LAB) strains have great potential to promote human and animal health by preventing the growth of pathogens. They can also be used for immuno-modulation, as they produce bacteriocins. However, the antagonistic activity of bacteriocins is normally determined by laboratory bioassays under well-defined but over-simplified conditions compared to the complex gut environment in humans and animals, where bacteria face multifactorial influences from the host and hundreds of microbial species sharing the same niche. This work describes a complete and efficient procedure to assess the effect of a variety of bacteriocins with different target specificities in a murine system. Changes in the microbiota composition during the bacteriocin treatment are monitored using compositional 16S rDNA sequencing. Our approach uses both the bacteriocin producers and their isogenic non-bacteriocin-producing mutants, the latter giving the ability to distinguish bacteriocin-related from non-bacteriocin-related modifications of the microbiota. The fecal DNA extraction and 16S rDNA sequencing methods are consistent and, together with the bioinformatics, constitute a powerful procedure to find faint changes in the bacterial profiles and to establish correlations, in terms of cholesterol and triglyceride concentration, between bacterial populations and health markers. Our protocol is generic and can thus be used to study other compounds or nutrients with the potential to alter the host microbiota composition, either when studying toxicity or beneficial effects.

Introduction

Bacteriocins are antimicrobial peptides produced by a wide range of bacterial species^1,2. These compounds and their producers, especially LAB, have been explored and exploited worldwide for decades for their potential applications in food preservation and medicine³. Several bacteriocins are known to kill important pathogens, including species of Listeria, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus, and Bacillus. Some bacteriocins even have the ability to modulate the immune response⁴. Many bacteriocins have relatively narrow spectra, a property that is much a....

Protocol

Care and handling must be carried out at a specialized animal care unit. Procedures described here were approved by the corresponding Ethics Committee of the University of Valencia and local authorities, following the principles of laboratory animal care mandatory by European Union Law and 2010/63/EU and the Spanish Government RD 53/2013 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, in order to respect the 3R principle in animal experimentation (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement).

1. Frozen Bacterial Cultures Used to Inoculate Mice

1. Inoculate individual strains of LAB in 5 mL of brain-heart infusion (BHI) medium and....

Results

The production of bacteriocins has been considered a positive probiotic feature in LAB, as it was assumed to prevent the growth of opportunistic bacteria and pathogens. The aim of this work was to show the capacity of bacteriocins to modulate gut microbiota populations in a mouse model. For this purpose, a procedure was developed to compare the effect of the intake of bacteriocin-producing strains and their isogenic non-producing strains. The procedure for the inoculation and the time ext.......

Discussion

The procedure described here has been used to determine whether changes in the microbiota are bound to health or age. Different parts of the protocol are important, but among them, sampling the feces, choosing the DNA fragment to be sequenced and analyzed, and performing the DNA extraction and bioinformatic analysis could certainly be the most critical points. Sampling is crucial because, for ethical reasons, mice should not be stressed and because it is known to change the proportion of bacteria in the gut. Samples must.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Balb/c mice (female)	Harlan		Mice should be 6 - 8 weeks of age
Plastic Petri dish	Thermo Scientific	101VR20
Brain-Heart-Infusion broth	Conda	1400.00
European Bacteriological Agar	Pronadisa	1800.00
Agarose D1 Low EEO	Pronadisa	8010.00
1x TAE buffer	Thermo Scientific	15558042
MRS broth	Difco	288130
PBS tablets	Sigma	P4417-100TAB
scale	Mettler Toledo	PB602-S
sterile forceps	Levantina de Laboratorios S.L.	260-3710014
Microcentrifuge	Eppendorf	5424
Centrifuge	Hermle	Z383K
sodium chloride	AppliChem Panreac	121659.1211
Realpure SSS Kit	Real Life Science Solutions, Durviz, Spain	RBME04 (300 ml)
Isopropanol	AppliChem Panreac	131090.1611
Ethanol	AppliChem Panreac	131086.1214
Qubit fluorometer	Invitrogen
Qubit dsDNA HS Assay Kit	Invitrogen	Q32851
AMPure XP beads	Beckman Coulter Genomics, USA	A63881 (60 ml)
PerfeCta NGS library quantification kit	Quanta BioSciences, Maryland, USA	733-2300
MiSeq v3 reagent kit	Illumina, San Diego, California, USA	MS-102-3003
Primers for 16S rRNA gene amplification			Primers contain V3-V4 region of bacterial 16S rRNA gene and Illumina overhang adaptors:5’-TCG TCG GCA GCG TCA GAT GTG TAT AAG AGA CAG CCT ACG GGN GGC WGC AG-3’ and 5'-GTC TCG TGG GCT CGG AGA TGT GTA TAA GAG ACA GGA CTA CHV GGG TAT CTA ATC C-3’
Nextera XT Index kit		FC-131-1002	Indices and Illumina sequencing adaptors
Micropestle for 1.5 mL tubes, Eppendorf / Sigma , Ref.	Sigma	Z317314-1PAK
Glass beads, 0.1 mm diameter	Biospec Products	11079-101
NucleoSpin Gel and PCR Clean-up Kit	Macherey-Nagel	740609.25
Omni Bead Ruptor 24	Omni International Inc.	19-040
mutanolysin	Sigma	M9901-10KU
lysozyme	Roche	10837059001
proteinase K	Roche	3115887001
RNase A	Sigma	R4875