Stable Isotope-Aided Metabolic Flux Analysis
The healthy and robust gut microbiota plays a key role in maintaining the host’s health condition – these symbiotic microorganisms are actively involved in the degradation of dietary compounds, facilitating the absorption of certain nutrients, fighting against pathogens, etc. Gut microbiota has raised great research interest and becomes a hot research area. Though next-generation sequencing-based approaches provide a panorama of the microbial community of gut microbiota, which allows for profiling and tracing of microbiota in a highly efficient manner, there still remains a lack of understanding with regard to gene functions and how microbiota interacts with the host. The metabolic analysis is the most direct approach to interpreting this crosstalk.
Metabolome provides a great deal of information on metabolic processes and metabolic outcomes, containing many metabolites of both clarified and uncharacterized. Stable isotope probing (SIP) offers an opportunity to trace active metabolic production even without knowing the identity of the produced metabolites as well as to conduct metabolic flux analysis, which provides the holistic research on the flux rates of the metabolite of interest and allows for better understanding of microbial and host physiology.
With state-of-the-art instrumentation and experienced scientists who have served in the multi-omics filed for many years, CD Genomics provides SIP-based metabolic flux analysis for gut microbiota research. SIP is based on the isotope labeling of the substrates with stable isotopes such as 13C, 15N, and 18O, which can proceed both in vivo and in vitro. The subsequent detection of isotopes can be performed in bulk biomass, single cells, or cellular components by mass spectrometry (MS), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), or other feasible technologies. Stable isotope-aided flux analysis can systematically quantify the flow distribution of metabolic networks and the relative contributions of each metabolic pathway. The great benefit of SIP-based metabolic flux analysis is the comprehensiveness towards the whole metabolic process, which covers the interpretation of the overall metabolic flow as well as the activity of various metabolic reactions in cells. It helps the deep understanding of a variety of complex intracellular metabolic processes, and intuitively reveals the main intracellular active pathways, relative contributions, and distribution characteristics of each pathway, contributing to the identification of crucial biomarkers and key major metabolic pathways, and it also promotes the understanding of regulation rules and interaction mechanisms between gut microbiota and the host.
CD Genomics is one of the most trusted companies in providing gut microbiota research services. We strive to provide the best strategies for your gut microbiota and related studies, and we will offer the most suitable strategies according to your sample and research purpose. To find out more about our stable isotope-aided metabolic flux services, please feel free to contact us.
*For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.