In humans, the composition of gut commensal bacteria is closely correlated with obesity. The bacteria modulate metabolites and influence host immunity. In this study, we attempted to determine whether there is a direct correlation between specific commensal bacteria and host metabolism. As mice aged, we found significantly reduced body weight and fat mass in Atg7 mice when compared with Atg7 mice. When mice shared commensal bacteria by co-housing or feces transfer experiments, body weight and fat mass were similar in both mouse groups. By pyrosequencing analysis, Bacteroides acidifaciens (BA) was significantly increased in feces of Atg7 mice compared with those of control Atg7 mice. Wild-type C57BL/6 (B6) mice fed with BA were significantly more likely to gain less weight and fat mass than mice fed with PBS. Of note, the expression level of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) was consistently increased in the adipose tissues of Atg7 mice, B6 mice transferred with fecal microbiota of Atg7 mice, and BA-fed B6 mice. Furthermore, B6 mice fed with BA showed elevated insulin levels in serum, accompanied by increased serum glucagon-like peptide-1 and decreased intestinal dipeptidyl peptidase-4. These finding suggest that BA may have potential for treatment of metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.

The best examples of halo nuclei, exotic systems with a diffuse nuclear cloud surrounding a tightlybound core, are found in the light, neutron-rich region, where the halo neutrons experience only weak binding and a weak, or no, potential barrier. Modern direct reaction measurement techniques provide powerful probes of the structure of exotic nuclei. Despite more than four decades of these studies on the benchmark one-neutron halo nucleus 11 Be, the spectroscopic factors for the two bound states remain poorly constrained. In the present work, the 10 Be(d,p) reaction has been used in inverse kinematics at four beam energies to study the structure of 11 Be. The spectroscopic factors extracted using the adiabatic model, were found to be consistent across the four measurements, and were largely insensitive to the optical potential used. The extracted spectroscopic factor for a neutron in a n j = 2s 1/2 state coupled to the ground state of 10 Be is 0.71(5). For the first excited state at 0.32 MeV, a spectroscopic factor of 0.62(4) is found for the halo neutron in a 1p 1/2 state. Nuclear halos are a phenomenon associated with certain weakly-bound nuclei, in which a tail of dilute nuclear matter is distributed around a tightly bound core [1][2][3]. This effect is only possible for bound states with no strong Coulomb or centrifugal barrier, and which lie close to a particle-emission threshold. Though excited-state halos exist, the number of well-studied halo states is predominantly limited to a handful of light, weakly-bound nuclei which exhibit the phenomenon in their ground state.The neutron-rich nucleus 11 Be is a brilliant example of this phenomenon, with halo structures in both of its bound states, and light enough to be modeled with an ab initio approach. It is well documented that the 1/2 + ground state and 1/2 − first excited state in 11 Be are inverted with respect to level ordering predicted from a naïve shell model. There has been considerable theoretical effort toward reproducing this level inversion in a systematic manner, while maintaining the standard ordering in the nearby nuclide 13 C, where the 1/2 + state lies over 3 MeV above the 1/2 − ground state. A Variational Shell Model approach [4] and models which vary the singleparticle energies via vibrational [5] and rotational [6] core couplings reproduce this level inversion in a systematic manner. Common to the success of these models is the inclusion of core excitation. Ab initio No-Core Shell Model calculations [7] have been unable to reproduce this level inversion though a significant drop in the energy of the 1/2 + state in 11 Be is reported with increasing model space. In all of these models, the wave functions for the 11 Be halo states show a considerable overlap with a valence neutron coupled to an excited 10 Be(2 + ) core, in addition to the naïve n⊗ 10 Be(0 + gs ) component. Despite decades of study, the extent of this mixing is not well understood, with both structure calculations and the interpretation of experimental results ranging from a few...

The extraction of detailed nuclear structure information from transfer reactions requires reliable, well-normalized data as well as optical potentials and a theoretical framework demonstrated to work well in the relevant mass and beam energy ranges. It is rare that the theoretical ingredients can be tested well for exotic nuclei owing to the paucity of data. The halo nucleus 11 Be has been examined through the 10 Be(d,p) reaction in inverse kinematics at equivalent deuteron energies of 12, 15, 18, and 21.4 MeV. Elastic scattering of 10 Be on protons was used to select optical potentials for the analysis of the transfer data. Additionally, data from the elastic and inelastic scattering of 10 Be on deuterons was used to fit optical potentials at the four measured energies. Transfers to the two bound states and the first resonance in 11 Be were analyzed using the Finite Range ADiabatic Wave Approximation (FR-ADWA). Consistent values of the spectroscopic factor of both the ground and first excited states were extracted from the four measurements, with average values of 0.71(5) and 0.62(4) respectively. The calculations for transfer to the first resonance were found to be sensitive to the size of the energy bin used and therefore could not be used to extract a spectroscopic factor.

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Pregnane X receptor (PXR) is an important nuclear receptor xenosensor that regulates the expression of metabolic enzymes and transporters involved in the metabolism of xenobiotics and endobiotics. In this study, ultraperformance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled with electrospray time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOFMS), revealed altered urinary metabolomes in both Pxr -null and wild-type mice treated with the mouse PXR activator pregnenolone 16a-carbonitrile (PCN). Multivariate data analysis revealed that PCN significantly attenuated the urinary vitamin E metabolite a-carboxyethyl hydroxychroman (CEHC) glucuronide together with a novel metabolite in wild-type but not Pxr -null mice. Deconjugation experiments with bglucuronidase and b-glucosidase suggested that the novel urinary metabolite was g-CEHC b-D-glucoside (Glc). The identity of g-CEHC Glc was confirmed by chemical synthesis and by comparing tandem mass fragmentation of the urinary metabolite with the authentic standard. The lower urinary CEHC was likely due to PXR-mediated repression of hepatic sterol carrier protein 2 involved in peroxisomal b-oxidation of branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA). Using a combination of metabolomic analysis and a genetically modified mouse model, this study revealed that activation of PXR results in attenuated levels of the two vitamin E conjugates, and identification of a novel vitamin E metabolite, g-CEHC Glc. Activation of PXR results in attenuated levels of the two vitamin E conjugates that may be useful as biomarkers of PXR activation.