Researchers discover a great diversity of protists in the Parabasalia phylum in mice and humans

A team of pathologists, geneticists, immunologists and engineers from the Stanford University School of Medicine has discovered a previously unknown diversity of protists in the phylum Parabasalia in mice and humans. In their article published on the open access site of the journal Cellthe group describes their study of the differences between protist species living in the intestines of mice and humans.

Protists are a type of single-celled microorganism. Previous research has shown that they coexist in the gut of many creatures, including humans and mice, with bacteria, fungi and other microbes. But as the researchers of this new effort point out, compared to other microbes present in the gut, protists have been little studied. One thing that has been learned about them is that they can trigger an immune response in the part of the intestine in which they reside, such as the small intestine.

To learn more about the diversity of protists in the mouse gut, the research team collected fecal samples from laboratory mice and examined them for different types of protists. They identified a previously unknown species similar to Tritrichomonas musculis, a protozoan found in the mouse intestine and known to trigger a type II immune response. They named it Tritrichomonas casperi. By examining its DNA, they discovered that it was a close relative of two types of species residing in the human gut.

By conducting experiments with the newly discovered species, they discovered that it had the means to trigger the production of T._H1 and T_H17 cells, but it did not excrete succinate, making it the only known gut protist identified by researchers incapable of triggering a type II immune response in the mouse small intestine. They also found that T. casperi tended to consume intestinal mucus rather than food ingested by its mouse host, and that mice that had T. casperi in their intestines had lower numbers of mucus-consuming bacteria in the same area. intestinal, suggesting that he was capable of outperforming them.

The researchers say their work shows that protists play much more than a secondary role in gut biome activity, and they suggest that more research needs to be done to learn more about their impact on overall gut activity.

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