Location: Grain Quality and Structure Research
Project Number: 3020-43440-002-035-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 31, 2023
End Date: Aug 30, 2025
Objective:
1) Analyze effect of sorghum polyphenols on microbiome of mice in two completed mouse studies using fecal samples collected during the study.
2) Analyze effect of sorghum polyphenols on human microbiome using a simulated 96 well setup.
Approach:
In vitro fermentation study:
ARS will provide sets of sorghum substrates from various bioprocessing/food processing steps to be evaluated for the effects of processing on in vitro digestion patterns by the human gut microbiome. These substrates will be used by the Benson laboratory in AiMS fermentation reactions. For the overall experiment, a total of 20 samples of sorghum substrates will be screened against diverse microbiomes from 20 different human subjects.
Microbiome analysis of mouse bran-feeding study
Two groups of 75 animals fed a control diet, 7.5% bran, 15% bran, and other fractions and then treated or not with DSS to induce GI inflammation. Animals were sampled at three time points each. All 300 samples will be shipped to the Benson laboratory for DNA extraction, 16s rDNA amplification and amplicon sequencing for microbiome analyses as we have previously described (Yang et al. 2022, Yang et al. 2023). Sequencing will feature normalization of 16S qPCR products from each reaction, rarefaction to control for levels of sequencing depth between each microbiome sample, conservative quality filter thresholds for filtering low quality reads.
