RePOOPulating the gut

09 Jan 2013

A stool substitute made from intestinal bacterial cultures may offer a new treatment option against a virulent strain of Clostridium difficile. A pilot trial, with two patients, is published in the new open access journal Microbiome this week. The researchers also demonstrate that the probiotic established itself in the host for more than six months by sampling the gut microbiome of the patients.

C. difficile infection is a bacterial disease of the gastrointestinal tract, caused by C. Difficile; a spore forming bacillus. It accounts for up to a quarter of antibiotic associated diarrhea. Elaine O Petrof and colleagues treated two patients who were infected with a virulent strain and who had not recovered following treatment with standard antibiotics. Within two to three days, both had recovered. The team went on to sequence the bacteria in the synthetic stool and in the treated patients and show that they match up. Six months later there was evidence that probiotics from the stool substitute remained.

Although a wider trial is needed, this proof-of-principal study demonstrates that a stool substitute mixture, with a multi-species community of bacteria may be capable of curing antibiotic-resistant C. difficile colitis.

Microbiome is a new journal, which reflects the growing need to study microorganisms and their function in their natural environment, their microbiome, whether that environment is the human body, an environmental niche or any other habitat.

Microbiome is edited by Jacques Ravel, University of Maryland and Eric Wommack, University of Delaware, together with a prestigious international editorial board including leading interdisciplinary scientists from academic centres, private and environmental research centres and federal agencies.

-ENDS-

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Notes to Editors

1.  Stool substitute transplant therapy for the eradication of Clostridium difficile infection:
‘RePOOPulating’ the gut
 Elaine O Petrof, Gregory B Gloor, Stephen J Vanner, Scott J Weese, David Carter, Michelle C Daigneault, Eric M Brown, Kathleen Schroeter and Emma Allen-Vercoe
Microbiome 2013, 1:3 doi:10.1186/2049-2618-1-3

Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central’s open access policy.

Article citation and URL available on request.

2.  Microbiome is an open access, peer reviewed journal. The central purpose of Microbiome is to unite investigators conducting microbiome research in environmental, agricultural, and biomedical arenas. Topics broadly addressing the study of microbial communities, such as, microbial surveys, bioinformatics, meta-omics approaches and community/host interaction modeling will be considered for publication. Through this collection of literature Microbiome hopes to integrate researchers with common scientific objectives across a broad cross-section of sub-disciplines within microbial ecology.

3.  BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine)    publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector. @BioMedCentral