E. coli and gut health-For the loser now will be later to win.

In humans, commensal gut bacteria participate in a miniature nitrogen cycle, metabolizing dietary nitrate and nitrite. While these processes can generate harmful N-nitrosamines, they may also produce beneficial nitric oxide (NO) or ammonium. Hager and colleagues demonstrate that E. coli, though representing less than 1% of the gut flora, plays a dominant role in reducing nitrate and nitrite in the gut, potentially detoxifying carcinogenic intermediates by converting nitrite to ammonium. Their findings reveal a beneficial facet of a bacterium otherwise often linked to disease.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  The FEBS Journal

• Publication date

  2025-11-14

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/febs.70326PMID 41236161PMCID PMC12998185
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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