Humans from different cultures and geographic locations differ in the diversity of bacteria in their guts, but the metabolic functions that those microbial communities serve are similar, according to a report out in Nature today (May 9). The findings come from a large-scale sequencing project carried out on 531 samples of human excrement from Africa, South America, and the United States.
“It’s a humungous paper, with multiple key findings,” said food scientist David Mills of the University of California, Davis. “An impressive and complex piece of work,” agreed molecular biologist Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College, London. Neither researcher participated in the study.
The scale and complexity stem from the research team’s aim of answering a multifaceted question—“What is the degree to which these microbial communities… ...
