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Microbial metabolism

nicX-ing bad habits with your microbial friends

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The human gut microbiome metabolizes hundreds of drugs, but the clinical relevance of these biotransformations remains unclear. Chen and colleagues show that gut bacterial nicotine metabolism protects against liver disease.

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Fig. 1: A transkingdom model for bacterial nicotine metabolism and host liver disease.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01DK114034; R01HL122593; T32HL007185).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Vaibhav Upadhyay & Peter J. Turnbaugh

  2. Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Peter J. Turnbaugh

Authors
  1. Vaibhav Upadhyay
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  2. Peter J. Turnbaugh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter J. Turnbaugh.

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Competing interests

P.J.T. is on the scientific advisory board for Pendulum, Seed and SNIPRbiome; there is no direct overlap between the current study and these consulting duties. V.U. has no relevant declarations.

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Upadhyay, V., Turnbaugh, P.J. nicX-ing bad habits with your microbial friends. Nat Metab 4, 1442–1443 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-022-00684-9

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