Mirage News
Mirage NewsScience20 Jul 2026 11:43 pm AESTDate Time
Pennsylvania State University
and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are seemingly everywhere. Not only is this group of more than 12,000 synthetic chemicals and compounds widely used in industrial and consumer products, the so-called “forever chemicals” are found in soil, water and air and has been detected in the blood of people and animals, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
Studies have linked PFAS to adverse health outcomes, with most studies focused on the impact of PFAS on the body’s tissues, according to Yuan Tian, associate research professor at Penn State. However, less is known about how PFAS affects bacteria and microbes that make up the gut microbiome – which plays a key role in maintaining health of the host organism – or the relationship between the gut microbiome and its host.
Now, with a four-year, $2.8 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, a team of researchers, led by Tian, will investigate how PFAS interacts with microbes in the gut and influences the relationship between the host and microbiome. By examining the molecular mechanisms underlying these interactions, the team said they hope to understand how environmental chemicals affect the dynamic community of microorganisms in the gut and how those changes might influence health and contribute to disease.
“This work will help reveal how PFAS disrupt the gut microbiome and how these changes affect host metabolism and metabolic health, providing a new framework for evaluating the safety of environmental chemicals,” Tian said
The grant builds on a previous seed grant from the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Penn State. In that project, Tian and colleagues screened approximately 200 strains of bacteria to see how they responded to PFAS exposure using a combination of high-throughput growth screening and in vitro studies
The preliminary findings showed that gut bacteria have varied responses to PFAS. Some microbes are highly sensitive – meaning that they are more strongly affected by PFAS and can fail to grow – while others are resistant to PFAS. This difference in sensitivity can change the balance of the gut microbiome by suppressing susceptible bacteria and allowing more resistant species to become more abundant.
“The results suggest that gut microbes may play an important role in determining how PFAS behave in the body and how individuals respond to environmental chemicals,” Tian said. “These findings could lead to more personalized approaches for assessing environmental health risks and pave the way for microbiome-based strategies to reduce the harmful effects of PFAS.”
With support from the new NIH grant, the researchers will expand the types of gut microbes studied and evaluate the host-microbiome interactions in mouse models. Tian said that the research team also intends to focus on PFOS and PFOA, the dominant forms of PFAS in the environment, as well as lesser-studied PFAS and PFAS precursors
Through this work, Tian said that the researchers aim to identify specific bacteria that can be targeted to reduce PFAS impact and protect human health. In addition, they hope to identify indicators that could potentially serve as biomarkers to judge environmental toxicity levels within gut bacteria
Penn State collaborators on the grant include Jeffrey Peters, distinguished professor of molecular toxicology and carcinogenesis; Jordan Bisanz, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and Dorothy Foehr and J. Lloyd Huck Early Career Chair in Host-Microbiome Interactions; Andrew Patterson, John T. and Paige S. Smith Professor of Molecular Toxicology and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; and Vonn Walter, associate professor of public health sciences and of molecular and precision medicine. Peters and Bisanz are co-principal investigators on the grant.
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