In Vitro Discovery Platforms

In Vitro Discovery Platforms

Due to the expense of human feeding studies and the intractability of studying the effects of hundreds-thousands of substrates on the gut microbiome in vivo, NFHC researchers rely upon in vitro approaches to discover components in food plants that affect the gut microbiome. The primary approach is the use of in vitro digestion-fermentation systems where stool microbiomes from human participants can be screened for the ability to ferment pre-digested substrates. Substrates may be whole seed from different genotypes of a food crop or refined/extracted components. There are two different high-throughput systems that are available to NFHC researchers—the Automated in vitro Microbiome Screening (AiMS) system and the Mini-Bioreactor Array (MBRA). AiMS is a miniaturized batch digestion-fermentation where several steps of the digestion process have been automated for extremely high-throughput testing. In contrast, the MBRAs afford continuous culture strategies for studying substrate-microbiome interactions as well as microbe-microbe and microbe-microbiome interactions.