The Poster Presentation award was discerned to Tina Jaenicke

During the Targeting Microbiota 2018 congress, the Scientific Committee awarded Tina Jaenicke from German Institute of Human Nutrition, Germany for her Poster Presentation entitled "The potential role of Clotridium ramosum in the development of obesity":

To investigate whether C. ramosum, a Gram-positive, anaerobic spore-forming intestinal bacterium is capable of promoting obesity in a complex gut microbiota community we orally applied either live C. ramosum or heat inactivated (dead) C. ramosum cells to conventional C57BL/6J mice fed either a low-fat diet (LFD) or a high-fat diet (HFD) for 21 weeks. Strikingly, both body-weight change and body fat were highly variable among the HFD-fed mice independently of the application of C. ramosum. Therefore, we separated the mice fed the HFD into responders and non-responders based on the increase in total body fat. Responders in the HFD live group showed a higher body-fat mass compared to the responders in the control group. In particular the subcutaneous, mesenteric and visceral white adipose tissues were increased in the responder HFD live group compared to the control group. The HFD live responder group showed enhanced lipid absorption but no changes in ß-oxidation. Although the liver weights were neither affected by the diets nor by C. ramosum application, liver triglyceride levels were elevated in the HFD live responder group. Furthermore liver glycogen was reduced in both HFD groups treated with C. ramosum. Data collected by indirect animal calorimetry indicated no differences in energy expenditure or activity among the groups.

To clarify why some mice respond to HFD while others don’t we plan to perform bacterial-population analysis on fecal samples using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. To understand the underlying mechanism of increased lipid absorption and subsequent lipid storage we will analyze intestinal and peripheral fat transporters by gene and protein expression analysis.

First, I would like to thank the organizers for opportunity present my PhD work there. Being for the first time at an international conference was a great experience and broaden my scientific knowledge. I met a lot of scientists with a similar background as mine, working on diverse topics which helped me to approach my project from a different perspective. The conference was well organized and people there made me feel very welcome. I would be very grateful to attend the conference in 2019.

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