What is it about?
Mammalian hibernation solves winter food scarcity through months-long fasting, but it also cuts off access to key diet-derived building blocks like carbon. Here, we show that hibernators harness the metabolic machinery of their gut microbes to recycle carbon from waste urea into acetate—a versatile molecule that benefits both the animal and its microbial partners.
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Photo by Bob Canning on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This work demonstrates a key host-microbe partnership that helps both parties makes it through the resource-limited winter: transforming waste molecules into useful nutrients. In the process, it reveals the microbiome’s important contributions to hibernation and suggests a place to look for ideas on how to benefit certain aspects of human health.
Perspectives
To me, this study demonstrates yet another way living organisms have evolved to be resourceful in times of scarcity. Especially neat here is the fact that two groups – the host animal and the microbial community in its gut – collaborate, each contributing their own physiological and metabolic tricks to aid their collective survival. There are probably lessons here, both for human health and perhaps the way we manage our own limited resources. Collaboration is also what made this study possible.
Matthew Regan
Universite de Montreal
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Host–microbiome mutualism drives urea carbon salvage and acetogenesis during hibernation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2518978123.
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