Figure 6 PFGE patterns of I-CeuI cleaved genomic DNA of Genome Group

I bacterial strains. Lanes: 1, S1; 2, S2; 3, S3; 4, S4; 5, S5; 6, S6; 7, S7. Discussion The likely health values of enterolignans and, on the other hand, difficulties in its large scale industrial production at low cost and without environmental pollution call for biotransformation technologies to convert plant lignans to them. Numerous bacterial NCT-501 chemical structure isolates that can conduct the biotransformation have been reported [8, 10, 12, 14–20, 23]. However, most of the reported bacteria require AR-13324 strict anaerobic conditions to grow and metabolize plant lignans to produce enterolignans, which significantly restricts large scale production. Here in this study, we report highly efficient production of END from defatted flaxseeds through biotransformation by human intestinal bacteria without having to culture the bacteria under anaerobic conditions. The method

described here has four advantages. First, instead of pure lignans (SDG, SECO, MAT, etc.), defatted flaxseed flour was used as the substrate for END production. As flaxseeds are widely available around the world and the defatted by-products of flaxseeds are usually used as animal feeds or even treated as waste, our study provides a very economic and eco-friendly method of END production using these low cost materials. Second, the high efficiency of END production by our bacterial culture system without the need of strictly anaerobic conditions makes large scale production much easier. Third, no extra carbon source would be CBL0137 mouse needed in the culture, which is especially advantageous, because the most energy-efficient carbon sources, e.g., glucose, normally repress the utilization of other energy sources by microorganisms. Therefore, in the absence of common carbon sources, the biotransformation of flaxseeds into END would be remarkably enhanced. Fourth, this method is entirely harmless

Florfenicol to the environment, as the solvents used in this procedure were only water and ethanol, both of which could be recycled. In this study, a bacterial consortium, END-49, was obtained from human intestinal microbiota through successive subcultures. END-49 was highly efficient in converting flaxseed lignans into END, producing up to 3.9 mg g-1, much higher than previously reported 0.6 mg g-1 (such as in [8]). END-49 consists of at least five genomically different bacterial lineages as estimated on the basis of PFGE analysis. As none of the single-colony isolated bacterial strains could produce END, we postulate that the biotransformation was conducted jointly by several different bacteria, including some or all the PFGE-resolved Group I-V strains and possibly some bacteria that escaped detection in this study. The Next-Generation sequencing technologies (e.g.