S-Adenosyl-L-Methionine protects the probiotic yeast, Saccharomyces boulardii,from acid-induced cell death

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Kristen Merloni¹  Nicanor Austriaco¹  Matthew Hurton¹  Daniel Gittings²  Vincent Cascio³  David Laprade⁴ 

[1] Department of Biology, Providence College, 1 Cunningham Square, 02918, Providence, Rhode Island, USA;Department of Biology, Providence College, 1 Cunningham Square, 02918, Providence, Rhode Island, USA;Boston University School of Medicine, 72 E Concord St, 02118, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Biology, Providence College, 1 Cunningham Square, 02918, Providence, Rhode Island, USA;Massachusetts General Hospital, 149 13th St., Rm. 6133, 02129, Charlestown, MA, USA;Department of Biology, Providence College, 1 Cunningham Square, 02918, Providence, Rhode Island, USA;Tufts University, Miner Hall 222, 02155, Medford, MA, USA;

关键词: S-Adenosyl-L-Methionine;    Saccharomyces boulardii;    Probiotic;    Acid-induced cell death;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-13-35

 received in 2012-08-27, accepted in 2013-02-05,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundSaccharomyces boulardii is a probiotic yeast routinely used to prevent and to treat gastrointestinal disorders, including the antibiotic-associated diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile infections. However, only 1-3% of the yeast administered orally is recovered alive in the feces suggesting that this yeast is unable to survive the acidic environment of the gastrointestinal tract.ResultsWe provide evidence that suggests that S. boulardii undergoes programmed cell death (PCD) in acidic environments, which is accompanied by the generation of reactive oxygen species and the appearance of caspase-like activity. To better understand the mechanism of cell death at the molecular level, we generated microarray gene expression profiles of S. boulardii cells cultured in an acidic environment. Significantly, functional annotation revealed that the up-regulated genes were significantly over-represented in cell death pathways Finally, we show that S-adenosyl-L-methionine (AdoMet), a commercially available, FDA-approved dietary supplement, enhances the viability of S. boulardii in acidic environments, most likely by preventing programmed cell death.ConclusionsIn toto, given the observation that many of the proven health benefits of S. boulardii are dependent on cell viability, our data suggests that taking S. boulardii and AdoMet together may be a more effective treatment for gastrointestinal disorders than taking the probiotic yeast alone.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Cascio et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.