Fecal microbiota transplants, or FMTs, are a magic bullet for patients with recurring infections from Clostridioides difficile ( C. diff ), but researchers are only beginning to understand why. A new in-depth study of pre- and post-transplant microbiomes shows that FMTs result in an increase of bacteria that inhabit the same niche within the gut as C.
diff, but without the negative consequences. The work could be an important step toward isolating more targeted treatments for patients with recurrent C. diff infections.
Fecal transplants from healthy donors are able to treat patients with recurrent C. diff sometimes very quickly – they save lives. But FMTs are not standardized and may have unknown long-term health consequences, so we need to move toward more targeted therapies.
To that end, we looked at FMT recipients' microbiome and metabolome, or small molecules inside the gut, to see how FMTs change that environment." Casey Theriot, professor of infectious disease at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study Theriot and colleagues at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used metagenomics and a sophisticated metabolomic platform called LC-IMS-MS to examine the stool microbiota and metabolome of 15 patients before and after FMTs. The microbiota refers to bacteria and their genetic information, while the metabolome refers to small molecules such as lipids, bile acids and amino acids.
The analysis found that the pre-transpla.