Gut Microbes and Humans on a Joint Evolutionary Journey
Published:07 Oct.2022 Source:Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Specific species and strains have been with people as humanity diversified and spread over the globe. To test if microbes evolved and diversified simultaneously with their human hosts, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology, the Institute for Tropical Medicine, and the Cluster of Excellence CMFI at the University of Tübingen systematically compared for the first time the evolutionary histories of humans and of gut microbes. The researchers created phylogenetic trees for 1225 human study participants as well as for 59 microbial species found within their guts, and used statistical tests to investigate how well these trees match.
Over 60 percent of the investigated species matched with the evolutionary history of their human host, meaning that these microbes co-diversified over ~100,000 years in the human gut when people fanned out of Africa across the continents. “We didn`t know that any of our gut microbes followed our evolutionary history this closely,” marvels Ruth Ley, head of the department for Microbiome Science at the Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, where the study was conducted, and deputy spokesperson of the CMFI.