Changes in bowel microbiota induced by feeding weanlings resistant starch stimulate transcriptomic and physiological responses.

The ability to predictably engineer the composition of bowel microbial communities (microbiota) using dietary components is important because of the reported associations of altered microbiota composition with medical conditions. In a synecological study, weanling conventional Sprague-Dawley rats (21 days old) were fed a basal diet (BD) or a diet supplemented with resistant starch (RS) at 5%, 2.5%, or 1.25% for 28 days. Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes and temporal temperature gradient electrophoresis (TTGE) profiles in the colonic digesta showed that rats fed RS had altered microbiota compositions due to blooms of Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria. The altered microbiota was associated with changes in colonic short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) concentrations, colonic-tissue gene expression (Gsta2 and Ela1), and host physiology (serum metabolite profiles and colonic goblet cell numbers). Comparisons between germ-free and conventional rats showed that transcriptional and serum metabolite differences were mediated by the microbiota and were not the direct result of diet composition. Altered transcriptomic and physiological responses may reflect the young host's attempts to maintain homeostasis as a consequence of exposure to a new collection of bacteria and their associated biochemistry.