Metabolic diversity in commensal protists regulates intestinal immunity and trans-kingdom competition
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Abstract
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This study reveals previously unrecognized phylogenetic diversity of commensal protists in the Parabasalia phylum in both mice and humans.
Thanks a lot for this very interesting and exciting work. It is super motivating to see studies of understudied (and under appreciated) microbes and get to see how important they are in microbial communities. Also, the work is very clear and pleasant to read. Congratulations on this great work.
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Therefore, identifying microbes eliminated by tritrichomonad colonization could offer insights into the preferred nutritional niches of these protists.
While the data strongly suggest that competition between specific bacterial species and the protist is associated with Tmu and Tc establishing in the gut, I am curious to know if the authors know if these two protist could actually graze on gut bacteria as well. Would that be possible to carry out some assays, especially now that the authors have developed a method to grow them in vitro , to test whether the Tmu and Tc actually graze on bacteria ; Assays comparing nutrient degradation rates of the protist species and the bacterial species could also be interesting to further confirm the hypothesis of nutrient competition, though it of course depends on the actual ability to growth …
Therefore, identifying microbes eliminated by tritrichomonad colonization could offer insights into the preferred nutritional niches of these protists.
While the data strongly suggest that competition between specific bacterial species and the protist is associated with Tmu and Tc establishing in the gut, I am curious to know if the authors know if these two protist could actually graze on gut bacteria as well. Would that be possible to carry out some assays, especially now that the authors have developed a method to grow them in vitro , to test whether the Tmu and Tc actually graze on bacteria ; Assays comparing nutrient degradation rates of the protist species and the bacterial species could also be interesting to further confirm the hypothesis of nutrient competition, though it of course depends on the actual ability to growth these gut bacteria in vitro.
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Together, these results demonstrate that a large amount of unappreciated diversity exists among human-associated commensal parabasalids and are consistent with previous studies suggesting that industrialization is associated with decreased diversity of microeukaryotes in the microbiome
This is really exciting data. I wonder if, using these metagenomes data, the authors had the opportunity to investigate co-occurrence (or co-exclusion) of protist and bacterial or fungal species of the gut microbiome, and whether we can expect strong signal of species co-occurrence.
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