Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) including ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and indeterminate colitis are increasingly common conditions that places a high physical and financial burden on individuals and global healthcare systems. Though treatments exist for these conditions, their unpredictable nature and causation make them difficult to manage consistently across the variety of IBD patients. Additionally, many of these treatments come with undesirable side effects or modes of delivery. Therefore, we consider the use of Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs) such as butyrate, whose affects in the human gut include decreased inflammation and decreased risk of colorectal cancer. As butyrate is produced primarily by microbial species within the human gut microbiome, this project’s aim was to identify butyrate producing bacteria via metagenomic analysis based on the presence of genes that are essential to pathways of butyrate production. In total, 73 different potentially butyrate producing species were identified and characterized. Species identified include both gram-positive and gram-negative anaerobic bacteria belonging to the classes Clostridia, Fusobacteriia, Negativicutes, Bacilli, and Bacteroidia. Of these, Clostridia was the highest scoring class of bacteria. CLICK TO REVIEW