Microbiomes are true to type
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Large assemblages of bacteria are turning up in the strangest of places, but perhaps none is more interesting than the communities that inhabit the human body. The compositions of these microbiota are far from random: only some bacteria are able to thrive in the host environment, and ecological interactions preclude many of all possible combinations of co-occurring species. Because the makeup of a microbial community dictates how it functions, hosts preferentially accommodate those bacterial cohorts that supply properties beneficial to their own health and physiology. Despite these factors, which serve to restrict the composition of bacterial communities, the gut microbiota remains one of the most complex assemblages surveyed to date. The microbiome is dominated by just a few bacterial phyla—mostly Firmicutes and Bacteriodetes, which together typically constitute 90% of the classifiable gut flora (1)—but surveys of human populations have revealed substantial variation among gut microbial communities at finer taxonomic levels. Arumugam et al. (2) proposed that human gut microbiomes can be grouped into multiple classes, termed “enterotypes,” based on the relative abundances of the resident bacterial genera. In PNAS, Wang et al. (3) adopt an experimental approach and provide strong evidence that alternative enterotype structures in the gut are ancient features of mammalian microbiomes driven by dietary variation.
Authors: Andrew H. Moeller, Howard Ochman
Institutions: Yale University, The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2064360885