Gut Bacteria May Help Combat COVID-19

Bacteria that reside in the human intestine produce compounds found to inhibit coronavirus. "We wondered whether gut resident bacteria could protect the intestine from invasion of the virus," said Mohammed Ali, a doctoral student at Yonsei University in Seoul.

So, researchers started screening dominant bacteria inhabiting the gut for activity against SARS-CoV-2. Bifidobacteria, which have proven active against irritable bowel syndrome and H pylori, can also combat coronavirus, said Ali.

Machine learning was used to search for illness-fighting compounds in databases containing microbially produced molecules "To train our model, we leveraged previous coronavirus datasets in which several compounds were tested against targets from coronaviruses," said Ali.

"This approach seems to be significant as those targets share features in common with SARS-CoV-2." Ali observed that many existing antibiotics and cancer therapies are compounds that bacteria use to compete with each other within the gastrointestinal tract, and that these were initially purified from microbial secretions.

"Finding microbes that secrete anti-coronavirus molecules will be a promising method to develop natural or engineered probiotics to expand our therapeutics prevention techniques, to provide a more sustainable way to combat the viral infection," said Ali.

Advertisement

Source-Medindia