# Positive nutritional selection of adults with healthy lifestyle and high daily fiber consumption for the isolation of beneficial intestinal bacteria: The iTARGET cohort study protocol

## TL;DR

This study aims to find beneficial gut bacteria from people with healthy lifestyles and high fiber diets to develop next-generation probiotics.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach to isolate beneficial intestinal bacteria from individuals with high fiber consumption and healthy lifestyles.

## Key findings

- The study will identify carriers of potentially beneficial bacteria through metagenomic profiling.
- It aims to culture and isolate at least one beneficial bacterial strain for further characterization.
- Findings will be published in open-access journals for broader scientific impact.

## Abstract

Recent advances in the study of the gut microbiota has pointed to its under-utilized source of potentially beneficial bacteria, known as next generation probiotics, offering a promising avenue to restore or compensate impaired gut microbiota toward a healthy state. Aside from the difficulties to achieve in-lab adequate culture conditions, the use of beneficial bacterial isolates is also limited by their bioavailability in the donor itself. In the iTARGET study, we positively selected donors based on their diet enriched in fiber, that has been shown to increase the prevalence of bacterial species associated with health.

The iTARGET study is a monocenter, prospective, observational study of adults with healthy lifestyle and high daily fiber consumption. We aim to recruit individuals in two phases, the first one for all individuals that will permit the identification of carriers for bacteria of interest and the second phase for a subset of individuals to allow for culture and isolation of previously identified potentially beneficial bacteria. Our primary outcome is the isolation and culture of at least one potentially beneficial isolate. The secondary outcomes comprised the high throughput metagenomic profiles of the intestinal microbiota and the characterization of the cultured isolates.

The study was approved by the French Research Ethics Committees (Comité de Protection des Personnes Sud-Est I) under the National reference ID 2023-A01677–38. Study findings and results will be published in peer-reviewed Open Access journals. (Trial registration number on ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT06166810).

Image, graphical abstract