Hydrogen (H2)-rich water, an apparent source of molecular H2, is an emerging functional drink with many purported benefits for human health (Yang et al., 2020; Ostojic, 2021). The preventive and therapeutic effects of H2 on various pathological processes have been intensively investigated in numerous clinical trials;it is commonly believed that the beneficial effects are mainly attributed to its selective antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties (Lee et al., 2015;Ohta, 2015;LeBaron et al., 2019; Qiu et al., 2020). In recent years, a handful of rodent studies revealed that exogen?ous H2 can affect the gut microbiota (Sha et al., 2018;Valdes et al., 2018). For example, H2 was reported to induce a higher abundance of butyrate-producing bacteria in a rat model of Parkinson's disease (Bordoni et al., 2019). Recent first-in-human trials have explored the effects of the long-term consumption of H2-rich water on antioxidant activity and the gut flora (Sha et al., 2018; Suzuki et al., 2018). Although these promising results suggest that the intestinal microbiota may be another plausible target for molecular H2, more studies are highly warranted to explain the mechan?ism(s) of H2 action on bacterial growth and functions.
22
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China;the Key Research Pro-gram of Frontier Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences;and the Yantai Region and College Integration Development Project;We thank all the staff at the BL01B beamline of the National Facility for Protein Science in ShanghaiNFPSat Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility for the assistance during data collection