Linking gut microbiome metabolism of fiber-snack glycans to multifunctional changes in human plasma proteomes

The worldwide increase in snack-food consumption associated with adoption of Westernized lifestyles provides an opportunity to introduce new nutritious foods into non-nutritious diets. We describe two 10-week-long pilot studies of obese or overweight individuals measured the effects of pea fiber- or orange fiber-containing snack food prototypes on the abundances of fecal microbiome glycoside hydrolases (GH) and polysaccharide lyases (PL), fecal glycan metabolism, and >1300 plasma proteins. Computational methods for feature selection plus contextual language processing software that extracts information from all PubMed abstracts referencing features of interest, identified treatment-discriminatory changes in GH and PL gene abundances that correlated with levels of fecal glycosidic linkages related to fiber metabolism, and plasma proteins representing diverse biological themes, including TGFβ/BMP-mediated fibrotic responses, VEGF-related angiogenic responses, P38/MAPK-associated immune cell biomarkers, and obesity-associated hormonal regulators. These results disclose fiber-snack prototype effects on microbiome function and host physiology in the context of varying background dietary practices.EGA study EGAS00001005330