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Abstract

Metabolic interactions between bacteria and their host play decisive roles in health and disease. The highly abundant gut commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (BT) produces bioactive lipids such as sphingolipidsthat we found to have an impact on host metabolic pathways, intestinal homeostasis, and hepatic ceramide profiles. Most current techniques however are not capable of spatially linking bioactive bacterial lipids and host metabolic changes. This bottleneck limits the understanding of bacteria-host metabolic interactions. Here, we strive to overcome this issue by utilizing mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) for mapping bacterial lipids in host tissue sections.