Microorganisms living our gut plays an important role in human health. In particular, their capacity to metabolize diatary compounds and other xenobiotics is particularly relevant, as it is directly affect nutrition, drug response, and disease risk. With advances in genomics analysis, we gain a lot of knowledge which type of enzymes those microorganisms carry, but we know very little which metabolites they can make. MicrobeRX, developed by Ruiz-Moreno et al., fills in this knowledge gap by generating over 68,000 chemical reactions rules for substrate-enzyme-product relationships from both human and microbial reactions. The study of Ruiz-Moreno et al. showed that 526 drugs were predited to be metabolized by both human and gut microbes, while 102 by human and 106 by gut microbes only. This finding highlights the importance of gut microbes in drug metabolism, response, and toxicity. Overall, MicrobeRX bridges the genomic and chemical spaces of the gut microbiome, making it a valuable tool for unlocking the chemical potential of the gut microbiome in human health, the food and pharmaceutical industries, and environmental safety.
This study was supported by the ERC-CoG grant to Jingyuan Fu, which aims to target the gut microbiome to improve drug efficancy.
Link to publication: MicrobeRX: a tool for enzymatic-reaction-based metabolite prediction in the gut microbiome
