PIXABAY, SHLOMASTER
Spouses and siblings who report feeling close to one another are more likely to exhibit gut microbial communities that are similar to one another, according to computational biologist Kimberly Dill-McFarland, a postdoc in the lab of Federico Rey at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who presented these data at the annual American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans this week (June 1-5). But, people share more species with their cohabitating spouse than with their siblings, and notably, social individuals are also more similar to one another in microbial composition than they are with other people.
Dill-McFarland collaborated with social scientists to obtain and analyze fecal samples from individuals participating in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study—a cohort consisting of 10,317 participants, surveyed every 10 years since they graduated high school in 1957. Five hundred participants completed a 2011 follow-up survey, were living on their own in select Wisconsin counties, and had a sibling in the study who submitted fecal samples for microbial analysis in 2014 to 2015; these individuals ranged from 58 to 91 years old.
The researchers analyzed beta diversity, or the degree to which individuals’ microbial communities differ from one another, and determined if there ...
