[News release] An International Team of Researchers Discover Strong Association Between Lifestyles of Indigenous Communities and Gut Microbial Ecologies

From the 25 March 2015 University of Oklahoma news release

…the team presents an in-depth analysis of the gut microbiome of the Matses, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer community, which is compared with that of the village of Tunapunco, who are highland small-scale farmers, as well as with urban city-dwellers in Norman, Okla.

In comparing the three groups to previously published studies in Africa and South America, the team observed a striking trend.  Human gut microbiota cluster together based on subsistence strategy more than geographic proximity.  Thus, hunter-gatherers in South America and Africa are more similar to each other than either are to rural agriculturalists or to urban-industrialists, even from neighboring populations.

It is now well accepted that human gut microbiomes are actively involved in health and that changes in our gut microbes from living more sanitized, industrialized lifestyles, has led to susceptibility to certain autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies.

Also, it has become clear that industrialization has led to a decrease in gut microbiome diversity.  Moreover, in the gut of industrialized peoples, one particular bacteria genus is conspicuously absent, Treponema.  These bacteria have co-existed with humans and other primates for millions of years, so their absence in industrialized people is disconcerting.

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[Press release] Among gut microbes, strains, not just species, matter

From the 29 January 2015 University of Washington press release

First large-scale analysis completed of intra-species genetic variation in gut’s resident organisms

By Leila Gray  |  HSNewsBeat  |  Updated 9:00 AM, 01.29.2015

Posted in: Research

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  Gut microbiomes from different people can contain similar microbial species, but different strains, as this cartoon illustrates.Dana C, Thomas

A large community of microorganisms calls the human digestive tract home.  This dynamic conglomerate of microscopic life forms – the gut microbiome – is vital to how people metabolize various nutrients in their food, how their immune systems react to infection, and how they respond to various medications.  Moreover, imbalances in the microbiome are thought to play a significant role in many human diseases.

The collection of species occupying the gut is known to be quite personalized, and people may differ considerably in the set of species they harbor. Now new research suggests that the differences between people may go even deeper. In a paper published Jan. 29 in Cell, researchers at the University of Washington show that even when people share microbes in common, the exact strains each carries might be very different.

“Knowing more about these strain-level variations,” said Elhanan Borenstein, the senior author of this paper and an associate professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, “is crucial for understanding the complex relationship between the composition of the community of microbes living in the human gut and its influence on health and disease.”

Read the entire article here–http://hsnewsbeat.uw.edu/story/among-gut-microbes-strains-not-just-species-matter

 

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