A team of researchers has found a way to turn the bacteria living in the digestive tracts of animals into factories that can produce compounds that promote longevity in their hosts—showing a potential new drug development strategy.

Janelia Senior Group Leader Meng Wang and her team study longevity and were interested in seeing how they could transfer their research findings about longevity-promoting compounds into practical applications.

One idea they had was to induce the body’s gut microbiota—a collection of bacteria in the gut that produces many different compounds—to produce metabolites that benefit their host animals. They started with one compound, colanic acid, which is generated by bacteria in the gut and had previously been found to promote longevity in roundworms and fruit flies.