There is increasing interest in the idea of using diet for health maintenance. Not only
does dietary intake determine the availability of substrates for host metabolism, but it can
also shape the composition of the intestinal microbiota, increasingly recognised as an
‘organ’ in its own right, which closely interacts with the mucosal immune system.
Alterations in the mammalian-microbial-metabolic axis are associated with disease
development and as such it is important to study the systemic consequences of dietary
intervention on these interactions in an appropriate animal model such as the pig.
The majority of the abundant metabolites present in porcine liver, kidney, serum and urine
were assigned by one and two dimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
spectroscopy and qualitatively compared; inter-compartmental differences in relation to
mammalian-microbial co-metabolic representation were identified in the pig, and the
applicability of NMR-based urinalysis to interrogate mammalian-microbial co-metabolism
in this species confirmed.
The initial weaning diet of pigs was found to initiate sustainable metabolic
reprogramming in the young pig, leading to a persistent urinary metabolic signature after
four weeks; this signature included metabolites linked to microbial metabolic processes
and could indicate a diet-induced microbial reprogramming event at weaning.
Differences in the initial weaning diet were also found to impact the metabolic and
immunologic consequences of Bifidobacterium lactis supplementation on the young pig.
The urinary metabolic profile from these animals was significantly correlated with
patterns of intestinal mucosal immunoglobulin secretion and thus indicates the potential
utility of biofluid-based metabolic profiling to assess mucosal responses to dietary
intervention
