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Residents of developing nations tend to have more diverse gut microbiomes than Americans. Now, a new study has found that people who have emigrated from Southeast Asia to the US shed some of that variety when they enter the country.
“We found that immigrants begin losing their native microbes almost immediately after arriving in the U.S. and then acquire alien microbes that are more common in European-American people,” coauthor Dan Knights, a computer scientist and quantitative biologist at the University of Minnesota, says in a press release. “But the new microbes aren’t enough to compensate for the loss of the native microbes, so we see a big overall loss of diversity.” The results were published today (November 1) in Cell.
Knights and his colleagues obtained their results by comparing the microbes in the stool of Hmong and Karen immigrants living in Minnesota with people of these ...
