The Biggest Microbiome Study Sheds Light on Shared Health Risks
. But because of the limitations of those studies, it wasn’t clear how much transmission was happening and whether it happened everywhere to the same degree.
This changed after Segata established his lab at the University of Trento in 2013. He and his team began to create and refine metagenomics tools that could distinguish between strains of the same species, which made it possible to study microbiome transmission in more detail. Segata started probing this question in 2018 by analyzing the microbes of mothers and their infants. His group’s findings and several other studies confirmed earlier suspicions that there is a massive amount of transmission from mother to baby, such that the mother is “imprinting the microbiome at birth,” Segata said.
So “it has to be transmission,” Segata said. “It has to be that what we have in the gut is coming from the gut of other individuals.”For the new global analysis of microbiomes, Segata, Valles-Colomer, and their colleagues honed their tools enough to recognize previously unknown species and different strains of the same species.
As they expected, they found that the most sharing of strains happened between mothers and infants in the first year of life—about 50 percent of the shared species found in the infants’ guts were strains that spread from the mother. The mother’s influence diminished with time—slipping from 27 percent at age 3 to 14 percent by age 30—but didn’t disappear. Some elderly people in China were shown to still share strains with their surviving centenarian mothers.
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