Contributions of gut microbiota-derived metabolites to neurodevelopment. Zebrafish metabolite RNA-seq

The focus of this project is to understand the contribution of gut-derived bacterial metabolites to the development of the nervous system. Given that an absence of microbiota has a negative impact on other developmental systems and that rapid nervous system development coincides with bacterial colonization, it was hypothesized that microbial absence also negatively impacts neural development. This was made with the assumption that this is at least in part due to the products of bacterial metabolism as certain metabolites such as SCFAs are known to act as neurotransmitters. Preliminary research in germ-free zebrafish revealed that bacterial metabolites are both necessary and sufficient for neural gene expression. Here, we use the zebrafish animal model as a proxy to determine the contribution of metabolites to early neurodevelopment through RNA-seq analysis.