Nandini Pharasi, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology
Co-relation between life forms:
Association between two different life forms that eat from the same bowl is known as commensalism. Commensalism is a relationship between species in which one benefits while the other is neither affected nor harmed. These bacteria do not harm them but depend on them to survive. Humans are the host for a variety of commensal bacteria in the body. For example, bacterias that consume dead skin. It plays an important role in infection prevention, nutrient acquisition, immune maturation, and nerve function.
The nutritional role of intestinal bacteria is well known and these bacteria have been found to play important roles in many physiological processes. Commensal bacteria arrange essential nutrients for the host. One species often uses another species for purposes other than food. For example, mites adhere themselves to giant flying insects to “travel for free”. These bacteria defend against the colonization of invading pathogens. This contributes to the development of the intestinal as well as the immune system. These bacteria can be found throughout an organism, but it is unidentified whether the association between their host and gut bacteria is heritable
The gut microbiota and its heritability:
Microbiome refers to the cluster of microorganisms living in or on the human body. Microbial community including bacteria, fungi, and viruses that colonizes in a particular environment. Your body is home to nearly 100 trillion microorganisms. The microbiota is primarily made up of native bacteria, most of which are known to be commensal or beneficial. The gut microbiota carries out many diverse jobs. The gut microbiota or microbiomes are microorganisms that live in the digestive tracts of humans and other animals including insects, bacteria, archaea, and fungi. Recent analysis and experiments state that diverse microbiome traits are heritable in baboons and also in humans.
For over 14 years, researchers examined fecal samples of 585 wild baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Most values of heritability were low but they found changes by correlating the age of the host with time. Baboons live in a microbiome similar to that of humans.
Prof. Elizabeth Archie said that “habitat or surroundings plays a greater role in the shaping of microbiome than genes. By contrast, what our study does is change our view from that genes have very little to do with the microbiome to one where genes play a vital role if, a small one. Microbiome’s heritability may give back some similar genetic determination in humans.
What the present study has to offer?
- This time researchers took 16,234 profiles of the gut microbiota from 585 wild baboons.
- The collected samples show the variation of diet in dry and wet seasons. The heritability was 48% higher in the dry season than in the wet. This might be because the baboons have a more diverse diet during the rainy season.
- 97% of traits were significantly heritable, including the abundance of microbes and overall diversity
- They concluded that heritability increases with age.
Significance of the study:
Previous studies state that only 5-13% of gut microbiomes are heritable in humans. Prof. Archie and her colleagues hypothesized that the possibility of lower results in previous studies is probably due to the measure of the microbiome at one point in time. Heritability in humans is still a question because they don’t have fecal samples of a decade and a half in freezers. Researchers further said that ‘the long-run profile and enormous sample size are criteria to quantifying the heritability of the microbiome‘. This shows the characteristics of the microbiome are selectively inherited depending on the host phenotype.
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References:
- Grieneisen, L., Dasari, M., Gould, T. J., Björk, J. R., Grenier, J.-C., Yotova, V., Jansen, D., Gottel, N., Gordon, J. B., Learn, N. H., Gesquiere, L. R., Wango, T. L., Mututua, R. S., Warutere, J. K., Siodi, L., Gilbert, J. A., Barreiro, L. B., Alberts, S. C., Tung, J., … Blekhman, R. (2021). Gut microbiome heritability is nearly universal but environmentally contingent. Science, 373(6551), 181–186. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba5483
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