Finding the Guts to Transform Health

Your stomach bacteria could help doctors prescribe personalized medicine for you in the future, according to a study co-authored by CU-Boulder professor Rob Knight.

After sampling stools from 33 mammal species living in zoos and the wild, Knight and his team found that gut microbial communities in humans and mammals play a key role in digestion and immune health. Furthermore, these functions are heavily influenced by whether humans and mammals are carnivores, herbivores or omnivores.

“If we can better understand this microbial variation, we may be able to begin searching for genetic biomarkers for disease,” Knight says.

Someday it might be possible to identify sites on the human body, including the gut, that would be amenable to microbial community transplants that would be beneficial to an individual’s health, he says.

The findings emphasize the need to sample humans across the globe with a variety of extreme lifestyles and diets, including hunter-gatherer groups, say the researchers. Such studies could provide insight into the limits of gut bacteria variation and the possibility that human microbes co-evolved with human bodies and cultures, shaping our physiological differences and environmental adaptations.