Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Cell Reports 11 (2015): 1-12, doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2015.03.049.
Description:
Although recent research revealed an impact of westernization on diversity and composition of the human gut microbiota, the exact consequences on metacommunity characteristics are insufficiently understood, and the underlying ecological mechanisms have not been elucidated. Here, we have compared the fecal microbiota of adults from two non-industrialized regions in Papua New Guinea (PNG) with that of United States (US) residents. Papua New Guineans harbor communities with greater bacterial diversity, lower inter-individual variation, vastly different abundance profiles, and bacterial lineages undetectable in US residents. A quantification of the ecological processes that govern community assembly identified bacterial dispersal as the dominant process that shapes the microbiome in PNG but not in the US. These findings suggest that the microbiome alterations detected in industrialized societies might arise from modern lifestyle factors limiting bacterial dispersal, which has implications for human health and the development of strategies aimed to redress the impact of westernization.
Description:
This study was partly funded by BioGaia AB. BioGaia had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. A portion of this research is part of the Microbiomes in Transition Initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). This research was conducted under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at PNNL, a multi-program national laboratory operated by Battelle for the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
