Who would’ve thought the little communities of microorganisms living in our guts would be another attribute of humans that makes each of us special?!
A recent study was conducted on premature babies in an IC unit to see how our gut microbiomes start to form after we’ve been born. Not exactly the most glamorous experiment, since it involved a lot of baby feces, but the findings were super interesting!! And the amount of new research that could be done past this point is- in a word- invigorating.
The basics of this study are, by examining premature babies’ feces, it was possible to observe the way that microbiomes were developing in the babies’ guts over time. This is interesting because there are a lot of crazy illnesses associated with this collection of microorganisms, from cancer to obesity to diabetes! And some of these can become life- threatening if not addressed properly.
So what did they find? As it turns out, even though generally similar things happen over the course of human gut-microbiome development, the processes of each person is different. In the study, they found that each baby was colonized by similar organisms to help with digestion. But these weren’t all the same, which means they didn’t interact with each other in the same ways. Even to a point where the same organisms in different babies made different proteins! Which is just crazy. This means that not only does it matter that our guts get colonized by good bacteria to begin with, but it also matters what types of bacteria are present and how they “talk” to one another.
Doesn’t that kind of blow your mind? Something so small can make such a huge impact on human health, and these small things actually communicate with each other whilst living inside of us and helping keep us healthy.
Crazy exciting stuff.
This research was conducted by scientists across the country (literally from California to Pennsylvania), and the paper they wrote goes into even more detail. Check it out if you’re intrigued: http://mbio.asm.org/content/9/2/e00441-18
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