Disruption of the spinal cord-gut axis alters microbial dynamics and carbohydrate cross-feeding in the gut
Mohamed Mohssen, Ahmed A. Zayed, Kristina A. Kigerl, Jingjie Du, Garrett J. Smith, Jan M. Schwab, Matthew B. Sullivan, Phillip G. Popovich · 2026
Read Disruption of the spinal cord-gut axis alters microbial dynamics and carbohydrate cross-feeding in the gut by Mohamed Mohssen, Ahmed A. Zayed, Kristina A. Kigerl, Jingjie Du, Garrett J. Smith, Jan M. Schwab, Matthew B. Sullivan, Phillip G. Popovich (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13597515.txt.
Description
Mohamed Mohssen and co-authors severed the spinal cord's link with the gut in mice and watched the gut microbes unravel over six months. Using genome-resolved reads on 333 samples, their 2026 study built more than six thousand draft microbial genomes into a new catalog of the lab mouse gut.
Broken signals shifted the gut community in ways that depended on how bad the injury was, on sex, and on time, with one friendly species, Lactobacillus johnsonii, steadily thinned. Feeding that microbe back to injured mice blocked the metabolic defects and body-wide inflammation the injury would otherwise cause. Community models suggested the microbes' sugar sharing networks had been rewired, starving the lost species. The authors present the work as proof that a healthy spinal cord governs the gut, and that genome-informed microbe therapy can repair the fallout.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Mohamed Mohssen, Ahmed A. Zayed, Kristina A. Kigerl, Jingjie Du, Garrett J. Smith, Jan M. Schwab, Matthew B. Sullivan, Phillip G. Popovich |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 80850 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |