Segatella Copri Complex species abundance as gut microbiota predictors of high sport performance and metabolic adaptation in a cycling Grand Tour
AbstractBackground: The gut microbiome is well known to have profound implications upon host health. Recent studies have shown that exercise can have a significant impact upon gut microbiota composition, although less is known about the impact of gut microbiome on athletic performance or the mechanisms involved. In this work, this influence has been analyzed through a longitudinal profiling of 15 professional cyclists across the three-week duration of a cycling Grand Tour using deep shotgun metagenomic sequencing of fecal contents, as well as gas chromatography coupled mass spectrometry metabolomics of blood plasma. This allowed us to resolve microbiome-wide metabolic pathway remodeling in response to extreme endurance demands and to identify microbial functional signatures associated with physiological and performance-related parameters throughout the race.Results: We collected fecal DNA samples from 15 cyclists competing in La Vuelta 2019 at the start and end of the tour. These samples underwent shotgun metagenomics sequencing to attain species level and gene level resolution. Based on microbiome composition at the start of the race, the 15 cyclists could be split into three clusters based on beta diversity using principal coordinate analysis and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) . One of the clusters experienced significantly worse race times and race positions. At the species level, this cluster exhibited a significant depletion of species in the Segatella copri complex. Community scale metabolic modeling predicted significantly lower export flux of the branched-chain amino acids L-valine and L-leucine, which are important for muscle performance, as well as significantly greater folate import flux. Longitudinal comparison of the microbiome composition of each cluster between the start and end of the race showed pronounce restructuring in the faster performing clusters, while there was a marked compositional stability in the slower cluster. In addition, blood plasma metabolomics identified cluster specific metabolic adaptations to the race, with the slower cluster experiencing attenuated accumulation of amino acids and greater depletion of xylitol. Measurement of clinical markers in blood plasma indicated that the slower cluster experienced attenuated accumulation of markers of muscle protein turnover.Conclusions: A gut microbiome containing a very low relative abundance of members of the S. copri complex is associated with poor race performance in cyclists. This may be due to reduced muscle protein turnover, as characterized by reduced accumulation of amino acids and proteins such as creatine kinase in blood plasma. Metabolic modeling proposes S. copri promoted biosynthesis of branched chain amino acids by the gut microbiome as the potential link between gut microbiome metabolic activity, systemic muscle metabolism, and race performance.