About the Authors

Vijay C. Antharam

vantharam@methodist.edu

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Daniel C. McEwen

Affiliation Department of Biosciences, Minnesota State University Moorhead, Moorhead, MN, United States of America

Timothy J. Garrett

Affiliation Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Aaron T. Dossey

Affiliation All Things Bugs LLC, Athens, GA, United States of America

Eric C. Li

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Andrew N. Kozlov

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Zhubene Mesbah

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Gary P. Wang

Affiliations Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America, Medical Service, North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System, Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Competing Interests

One of the co-authors of the manuscript, Dr. Aaron T. Dossey, is the President, Founder and Owner of All Things Bugs LLC. The company does research on insects based food, insect farming and produces insect/cricket powder/flour. It is not currently involved in research involving cholesterol metabolism or *Clostridium difficile* infection. For this specific manuscript, Dr. Dossey served as a collaborator assisting with study design, protocol development and data analysis. Neither he nor his company (All Things Bugs LLC) provided financial support for this project. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: VA TG ATD GPW. Performed the experiments: VA AK ZM. Analyzed the data: VA DM TG EL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: TG GPW. Wrote the paper: VA DM GPW.