And lead to diseases and conditions including obesity
Gut bacteria may be transmitted between friends and family
Author: Professor Joyce Harper
About 2% of our body weight is due to bacteria, with 100–1,000 bacterial species in the gut. The balance of our gut microbiota (bacteria) is required for health and wellbeing but there is huge diversity between individuals which may be as unique as a fingerprint. There is a lot of research that needs to be done to determine what is a ‘healthy’ balance of gut microbiota – research has been slow as these bacteria are difficult to culture and isolate in the lab. We have previously reported how individuals with different gut bacteria respond to blood sugar levels and how what we eat and drink can influence our gut bacteria.
In 2007 a study from Harvard reported that obesity may be ‘contagious’, They followed over 12,000 people over 32 years and found that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese.
A decade ago, scientists from Washington University showed that putting gut bacteria from obese mice into thin mice made the thin mice obese.
Yesterday these two ten year old studies got linked as scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK reported that over half gut bacteria species produce spores which survive in air and could possibly be transmitted to another person and cause a number of diseases and conditions, including obesity and Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which includes Crohn’s Disease and Colitis.
Dr Trevor Lawley who lead the study said “I think there are definitely diseases that are caused by an imbalance in microbiotia. If you look at something like Inflammatory Bowel Disease, or obesity, that’s a possibility. People who live in the same house share a similar microbiome. And genetics only really accounts for between 7 – 13 per cent of the risk. There are definitely people who are more susceptible to disease and so it could be a combination of things. Being able to cast light on this microbial ‘Dark matter’ has implications for the whole of biology and how we consider health.”
Hilary Browne, one of the scientists involved in the study, said “It has become increasingly evident that microbial communities play a large role in human health and disease. By developing a new process to isolate gastrointestinal bacteria, we were able to sequence their genomes to understand more about their biology. We can also store them for long periods of time making them available for further research.”
Watch this space.
Read More:
Read the full paper from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Image credit: www.bbc.co.uk
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