Non-invasive Analysis of Peptidoglycan from Living Animals

The role of the intestinal microbiota in host health is increasingly revealed in its contributions to disease states. The host-microbiome interaction is multifactorial and dynamic. One of the factors that has recently been strongly associated with host physiological responses is peptidoglycan from bacterial cell walls. Peptidoglycan from gut commensal bacteria activate peptidoglycan sensors in human cells, including the Nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain containing protein 2 (NOD2). When present in the gastrointestinal tract, both the polymeric form (sacculi) and de-polymerized fragments can modulate host physiology, including checkpoint anticancer therapy efficacy, body temperature and appetite, and postnatal growth. To leverage this growing area of biology towards therapeutic prescriptions, it will be critical to directly analyze a key feature of the host-microbiome interaction from living hosts in a reproducible and non-invasive way. Here we show that metabolically labeled peptidoglycan/sacculi can be readily isolated from fecal samples collected from both mice and humans. Analysis of fecal samples provided a non-invasive route to probe the gut commensal community including the metabolic synchronicity with the host circadian clock. Together, these results pave the way for non-invasive diagnostic tools to interrogate the causal nature of peptidoglycan in host health and disease.