bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.22.350801; this version posted October 22, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Parabacteroides distasonis enhances Type 1 Diabetes autoimmunity via molecular mimicry 2 3 Qian Huang1, I-Ting Chow2, Claudia Brady1, Amol Raisingani1, Danmeng Li3, David A. Ostrov3, 4 Mark A. Atkinson3,4, William W. Kwok2, C. Ronald Kahn5, Emrah Altindis1* 5 6 1 Boston College Biology Department, Higgins Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue Chestnut Hill, 7 MA 02467, USA 8 2 Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason, Seattle, WA 98101, USA 9 3 Department of Pathology, Immunology and Laboratory Medicine, College of Medicine, 10 University of Florida Diabetes Institute, Gainesville, FL 32610-3633, USA 11 4 Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Florida Diabetes Institute, 12 Gainesville, FL 32610-3633, USA 13 5 Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02215, USA 14 *Corresponding Author: Emrah Altindis, Boston College Biology Department, Higgins Hall, 15 140 Commonwealth Avenue Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. E-mail:
[email protected] 16 17 One Sentence Summary: The human gut commensal bacterium, Parabacteroides distasonis, 18 accelerates type 1 diabetes in the NOD mouse model of the disease and involves expression of an 19 insulin B:9-23 epitope mimic, supporting a potential disease mechanism involving molecular 20 mimicry. 21 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.22.350801; this version posted October 22, 2020.