Despite enormous effort invested in profiling gut microbiota metabolic activity and its relationship to the onset and progression of several cancer types, most microbial metabolic information is obtained from fecal samples that absent bioactive metabolites originating from bacterial populations in the small intestine. In this project, we develop an approach for noninvasive in vivo visualization and mapping gut bacteria's metabolic profiles with MRI. We can obtain spatial maps of downstream metabolites inside an intact subject by rationalizing the labeling of diet components with MRI-detectable isotopes (2H and 19F). We envision a new era of mapping and understanding the gut microbiome-cancer axis, which could be established upon successfully developing this tool.
