TY - JOUR T1 - Symbiotic bacteria enhance exercise performance JF - British Journal of Sports Medicine JO - Br J Sports Med DO - 10.1136/bjsports-2020-102094 SP - bjsports-2020-102094 AU - Jon O Lundberg AU - Chiara Moretti AU - Nigel Benjamin AU - Eddie Weitzberg Y1 - 2020/05/23 UR - http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/23/bjsports-2020-102094.abstract N2 - In a recent Nature Medicine article Scheiman and colleagues studied the influence of the gut microbiome on exercise performance in elite runners and identified a performance-enhancing microbe belonging to the genus Veillonella.1 The bacterium Veillonella atypica was enriched in marathon runners after a race and inoculation of the same strain into mice increased exhaustive treadmill run time. The authors suggest that V. atypica improves run time via its metabolic conversion of exercise-induced lactate into propionate, thereby identifying a natural, microbiome-encoded enzymatic process that enhances athletic performance. Here we highlight an additional means by which Veillonella may help to achieve the same result (figure 1).Figure 1 Inorganic nitrate from endogenous and dietary sources is metabolised in humans to nitrite and then nitric oxide and other bioactive nitrogen oxides with effects on mitochondrial function and skeletal muscle contraction. Oral nitrate reducing bacteria … ER -