BHOPAL: The Indian Institute of Science Education Researchers at Research Bhopal have developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based method to predict how bacteria in the gut break down various types of food and medicines.
This web-based tool provides information on specific bacterial enzymes, reactions, and bacteria involved in the process of digestion and absorption of nutrients by the human intestine.
IISER Bhopal team has created an AI-based tool called “gutbug” which can potentially predict all possible bacterial enzymes acting on bioactive dietary molecules, as well as oral medications. The finding of this research was recently published in the Journal of Molecular Biology.
The article has been co-written by Dr. Vineet sharmaassociate professor in the department of biological sciences, IISER Bhopalalong with research scholars Aditya Malwe and gopal srivastava. gutbug is available at https://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/gutbug.
The collection of good bacteria in the gut is called the gut microbiome, and it plays a crucial role in the bodily processes of everything a human being consumes orally. The number of microbes living in the gastrointestinal tract is greater than the number of human cells in the body.
The human gut microbiome is made up of more than a thousand different species of bacteria, which have more than 3.3 million unique genes. These bacteria secrete enzymes to process what a human being eats and provide the body with various metabolites that are essential for health and bodily functions. However, studying the complex host-microbe relationships is challenging due to the vastness of the microbiome and the fact that the collection of bacteria varies between individuals.
Explaining the technical aspects of the research, Dr. Vineet K. sharma He said: “GutBug uses a combination of machine learning, neural networks, and chemoinformatics methods. We used a curated database of 363,872 enzymes from ~700 human intestinal bacterial strains and a substrate database consisting of 3,457 enzymes to train the AI model.”
Dr Sharma said: “GutBug can help to better understand how gut bacteria process the food we eat or medicines we take orally and how this affects our health. Such understanding may be useful in designing diets, developing new prebiotics, creating nutraceuticals, and improving drug design based on the nature of the gut bacteria each individual has, leading to personalized medicine.”
