Circumventing Interindividual Variability: Dietary Fibers of High Specificity Allow Predictable Shifts in the Gut Microbiota

Objectives: Most dietary fibers currently used as prebiotics show different and therefore unpredictable responses in individuals harboring distinct microbial communities. We previously proposed that fibers of higher structural specificity (i.e., used by a narrow group of gut bacteria) could have more similar responses across subjects than low specificity ones (i.e., used by many gut bacteria). We aimed to test this hypothesis using gut microbial communities from different individuals as well as to understand how structural variations affect microbiota outcomes of high specificity fibers.