WIKIMEDIA, SKIMSTA The symbiotic relationship between the bacterial strains that make up a large portion of the gut microbiome and their primate hosts has evolved for around 15 million years, according to a study published today (July 20) in Science. While the full spectrum of bacteria that populate our digestive tracts are influenced by factors like antibiotic use, diet, and birth mode, the results suggest that the gut bacterial strains in modern humans evolved and diverged from ancestral bacterial strains in parallel with the evolution and divergence of humans from our hominid ancestors.
“The data are not shocking, but very interesting,” Martin Blaser, who studies the human microbiome at New York University and was not involved in the work, told The Scientist. “The study provides strong evidence that the microorganisms in our gut are ancestral rather than a product just of our current environment.”
“This paper sets the stage for the possibility that our mutualistic gut bacteria evolved at the same rate as hominids, which, to me, suggests that this mutualistic symbiosis helped the human species evolve,” said Julie Segre, a microbial genomics researcher at the National Human Genome Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study but penned an accompanying perspective.
Howard Ochman at the University of Texas in Austin and colleagues collected ...
