Three-stage continuous culture system with a self-generated anaerobia to study the regionalized metabolism of the human gut microbiota. uncultured bacterium

A three-stage continuous fermentative system was developed to simulate and control physicochemical factors of the gut biology. Inoculation was of each reactor was performed from a human fecal sample which was initially amplified with a batch procedure. Samples from the initial feces, the batch and from the bioreactors media were collected to extract bacterial DNA. 16S PCR amplification was performed to assess the microbial diversity at the family level using the HuGChip. Amplified DNA was purified and labelled with either Cy3 or Cy5 dye and hybridized on the microarray. Overall design: A 5 chip study was realized, each corresponding to hybridization with 250ng of labelled 16S rRNA gene amplicons from either the initial stool, the batch inoculum or fermentative medium different compartments of the simulated colon (Proximal, Transversal and Distal). Each probe (4441) was synthetized in three replicates.