Ground squirrels hibernate for months on end every year – and their gut microbes help them do it by breaking down urea, the main compound of urine, to recycle the nitrogen it contains
Regan and his team examined several groups of ground squirrels at various stages of their hibernation cycles, but gave half of the animals microbiome-depleting antibiotics. In the untreated squirrels, the researchers tracked nitrogen compounds like ammonia and glutamine all the way from the squirrels’ stomachs to muscles and proteins in their livers. For the depleted squirrels, these compounds weren’t found in significant numbers in their muscles and liver.
“The microbes are important in all this because they have this ability to break urea down into its component parts, freeing up nitrogen to then be used again at a time when there is no new nitrogen coming into the animal at all,” says Regan. The urea-eating bacteria also benefit from this process, which could explain how the mutually beneficial arrangement came about. “It’s a symbiosis that allows both of them to effectively emerge from hibernation in good shape,” he says.
Humans have also demonstrated the capacity to salvage nitrogen from urea, though not in amounts as significant as those seen in squirrels. Understanding how squirrel microbiomes recycle urea could help us mitigate muscle loss and nutrient depletion in a wide variety of scenarios, including the muscle loss associated with old age and with space flights in microgravity.Kevin Kohl
at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “Some of these things might not exist in humans, but it’s going to give us such a better understanding of the process. We might not know what bits we’re going to pull over to the human side, but as we learn more, it’s going to allow us to do that.”
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