Alistipes can effectively inhibit inflammation via preventing LPS-induced TNF-α release at higher concentrations (Canfora et al., 2015) and has been found at lower levels in the gut of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (Ren et al., 2019), colitis (Jiang et al., 2018) and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (Tang et al., 2018). Here, TNF is linked to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.