Probiotic Protection? Gut Bacteria Discovered That Protects the Intestine From Invasion of the COVID-19 Virus

Researchers at Yonsei University in South Korea have found that certain commensal bacteria that reside in the human gut produce compounds that inhibit SARS-CoV-2. The research will be presented on June 20 at the World Microbe Forum, an online meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), and several other associations that will take place online from June 20-24.

Previous clinical findings have shown that some patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 have gastrointestinal symptoms, while others showed signs of infection only in the lungs.

“We wondered if gut bacteria could protect the gut from virus invasion,” said Mohammed Ali, a Ph.D. medical student at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.

To investigate this hypothesis, the researchers screened dominant bacteria that inhabit the gut for activity against SARS-CoV-2. Their search revealed that Bifidobacteria, which had previously been shown to suppress other bacteria such as H. pylori and have been shown to be active against irritable bowel syndrome, had such activity, Ali said.

The researchers also used machine learning to search for potential disease-fighting compounds in databases containing microbially produced molecules, and discovered some that could also be useful against SARS-CoV-2. “To train our model, we used previous coronavirus datasets where different compounds were tested against coronavirus targets,” said Mr. Ali. “This approach seems important because those targets have features in common with SARS-CoV-2.”

Ali emphasized the ecological nature of his approach to this work, noting that many existing antibiotics and cancer therapies are compounds that bacteria use to compete with each other in the gastrointestinal tract, initially purified from microbial secretions.

“Finding microbes that secrete anti-coronavirus molecules will be a promising method to develop natural or engineered probiotics to expand our therapeutic prevention techniques, to provide a more sustainable way to fight the viral infection,” said Ali.

Junebeom Kim, a master’s candidate, also contributed to this research. Ali and Kim were supervised by Sang Sun Yoon, Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Brain Korea 21 Project for Medical Sciences, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea.

World Microbe Forum is a collaboration between the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), and several other societies, breaking down barriers to science sharing and addressing the most pressing challenges facing humanity today. faced.