Microbiome diversity is influenced by chance encounters
Within the human digestive tract, there are trillions of bacteria, and these communities contain hundreds or even thousands of species. The makeup of those populations can vary greatly from one person to another, depending on factors such as diet, environmental exposure, and health history. A new study of the microbe populations of worms offers another factor that may contribute to this variation: chance. MIT researchers found that when they put genetically identical worms into identical environments and fed them the same diet, the worms developed very different populations of bacteria in their gut, depending on which bacteria happened to make it there first. “This study shows that you can have heterogeneity that’s driven by the randomness of the initial colonization event. That’s not to say the heterogeneity between any two individuals has to be driven by that, but it’s a potential source that is often neglected when thinking about this variation,” says Jeff...