Ancient poop reveals ‘extinction event’ in human gut bacteria

# · ✸ 56 · 💬 16 · 2 years ago · www.sciencemag.org · scarmig · 📷
Now, 1000-year-old piles of dried-out poop are offering insights into how the billions-strong bacterial ecosystems in the human gut have been altered by sanitation, processed foods, and antibiotics. The data give scientists their first good look at ancient gut bacterial communities, says Stanford University biologist Justin Sonnenburg. Previous studies have used the gut bacteria of today's hunter-gatherers and herders as a proxy for the ancient microbiome. Earlier attempts to analyze the ancient gut microbiome had been thwarted by the challenge of sorting ancient gut bacterial DNA from that of microbes invading from the surrounding soil, says Marsha Wibowo, a Ph.D. student at Harvard's Joslin Diabetes Center, who analyzed the DNA. She singled out the ancient gut species by focusing on DNA that had been damaged by time, and on sequences from bacteria known to be associated with the mammalian gut. Some of the ancient DNA was unfamiliar evidently representing never-before-seen kinds of extinct bacteria. The coprolites yielded 181 genomes that were both ancient and likely came from a human gut. Insights into the ancient gut could someday inform commercial efforts to reshape modern microbiomes, he says.
Ancient poop reveals ‘extinction event’ in human gut bacteria



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