Obesity impairs short-term and working memory through gut microbial metabolism of aromatic amino acids.

A total of 116 obese (n=65) and non-obese (n=51) patients were recruited for cognitive tests and microbiota analysis. Faecal samples were collected from those subjects. In addition, under blinded condition, 33 mice previously treated with antibiotics were colonized via oral gavage of donor microbiota for 3 days: 11 with saline material, 11 with faecal material from some of the humans with better cognitive scores, and 11 with faecal material from some of the humans with decreased cognitive scores in the previous cognitive tests,For all samples, the metagenomic taxonomic and gene shot-gun analysis of the microbiota was carried out by a metagenomic approach, using a shotgun sequencing with the Illumina NextSeq with 150 bp x2 chemistry.