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. 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.
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