S. Leanti La Rosa

This study shows that xanthan gum, a common food additive, promotes the adaptation of the human gut microbiota by enabling a novel degradation pathway in an uncultured Ruminococcaceae bacterium and facilitating cross-feeding by Bacteroides species.

The paper investigates how Bifidobacterium longum strains adapt to changing infant diets through genomic and phenotypic analysis of strains from breast- and formula-fed infants.

This paper identifies two esterases from a gut bacterium that cooperatively deacetylate complex β-mannans, revealing their structural and functional mechanisms.