Microbiome genes on the move
The word “culture” typically refers to a group’s shared heritage — such as its customs, cuisine, music, and language — that connects people in unique ways. But what if culture extended to a population’s microbiome, the collection of microorganisms that live on and within the human body? Scientists are learning that the state of the microbiome can have an impact on human health, with the risk for everything from autoimmune disease to certain cancers being linked to the diversity and wellbeing of the trillions of microbes living in and on the body. In work published in this week’s Nature, Eric Alm and Ilana Brito from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and their colleagues took a deep look at the microbiomes in developing world populations to study how culture can influence their makeup. They uncovered an interesting role for “mobile genes” — genetic material that moves between organisms by...