Symbiotic Bacteria Enhance Exercise Performance

In a recent Nature Medicine article Scheiman and colleagues studied the influence of the gut microbiome on exercise performance in elite runners and identified a performance-enhancing microbe belonging to the genus Veillonella .1 The bacterium Veillonella atypica was enriched in marathon runners after a race and inoculation of the same strain into mice increased exhaustive treadmill run time. The authors suggest that V. atypica improves run time via its metabolic conversion of exercise-induced lactate into propionate, thereby identifying a natural, microbiome-encoded enzymatic process that enhances athletic performance. Here we highlight an additional means by which Veillonella may help to achieve the same result (figure 1).\n\n\n\nFigure 1 \nInorganic nitrate from endogenous and dietary sources is metabolised in humans to nitrite and then nitric oxide and other bioactive nitrogen oxides with effects on mitochondrial function and skeletal muscle contraction. Oral nitrate reducing bacteria …