Noninvasive 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 activates peptidoglycan sensors in human cells, including the nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain-containing protein 2. When present in the gastrointestinal tract, both the polymeric form (sacculi) and depolymerized fragments can modulate host physiology, including checkpoint anticancer therapy efficacy, body temperature and appetite, and postnatal growth. To utilize this growing area of biology toward therapeutic prescriptions, it will be critical to directly analyze a key feature of the host-microbiome interaction from living hosts in a reproducible and noninvasive 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 noninvasive route to probe the gut commensal community including the metabolic synchronicity with the host circadian clock. Together, these results pave the way for noninvasive diagnostic tools to interrogate the causal nature of peptidoglycan in host health and disease.