Health Farm

-- Now there’s something a little more exotic that could soon be added to the list of legal performance enhancers – gut microbe.

Professional athletes will try almost anything to get an edge, even the illegal stuff. Weekend warriors show similar enthusiasm for sly help, though in most cases draw the line at doping. We’ve tried coffee, BCAA, beetroot juice, and beta alanine – all known ergogenic aids.

How about microbes? A study published in the journal Nature Medicine identified a group of bacteria that are more common in athletes, especially after exercise, that may play a role in enhancing athletic performance.

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Keen to explore the bacteria’s performance-boosting potential, researchers isolated the bacterial strain from elite runners and inserted it into the colons of lab mice. Tah-dah! The mice notched up a 13% performance improvement on a treadmill exertion test.

The group of bacteria doing the athletic business is called Veillonella.

Scientists spent weeks collecting faecal samples from runners, comparing their microbes after running a marathon with microbiomes of non-runners. Digging deeper, they learned that Veillonella eats lactate – a chemical by-product of intense exercise that’s associated with fatigue – and converts it to a molecule called propionate.

Another round of testing on the mice confirmed that propionate produced the same endurance boost as Veillonella.

Lead researcher Jonathan Scheiman, who since conducting the research left academia to run a company called FitBiomics, is now on a mission to mine the biology fit people to produce next-generation probiotics.

Results of testing Veillonella in human subjects haven’t yet been published.