Seasonal Cycling in the Gut Microbiome of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

By S. Smits, J. Leach, E. Sonnenburg, Carlos G. Gonzalez, Joshua S Lichtman, Gregor Reid, Rob Knight, A. Manjurano, J. Changalucha, Joshua E. Elias and 2 more. Science, 2017

757 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Seasonal diets, seasonal microbiota Among the Hadza of western Tanzania, a few hundred people still live in small groups as hunter-gatherers, reliant solely on the wild environment for food. Smits et al. found that the microbiota of these people reflects the seasonal availability of different types of food (see the Perspective by Peddada). Between seasons, striking differences were observed in their gut microbial communities, with some taxa apparently disappearing, only to reappear when the seasons turned. Further comparison of the Hadza microbiota with that of diverse urbanized peoples revealed distinctly different patterns of microbial community composition. Science, this issue p. 802; see also p. 754 The composition of microbes in the guts of the Hadza hunter-gatherers undergoes an annual cyclic reconfiguration. Although humans have cospeciated with their gut-resident microbes, it is difficult to infer features of our ancestral microbiome. Here, we examine the microbiome profile of 350 stool samples collected longitudinally for more than a year from the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. The data reveal annual cyclic reconfiguration of the microbiome, in which some taxa become undetectable only to reappear in a subsequent season. Comparison of the Hadza data set with data collected from 18 populations in 16 countries with varying lifestyles reveals that gut community membership corresponds to modernization: Notably, the taxa within the Hadza that are the most seasonally volatile similarly differentiate industrialized and traditional populations. These data indicate that some dynamic lineages of microbes have decreased in prevalence and abundance in modernized populations.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1aa5afa486f563f4b0d8c27e392dc498a613b11b

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Citations in the corpus

U.S. immigration westernizes the human gut microbiome (2018, background): “Rural indigenous populations have been found to harbor substantial biodiversity in their gut microbiomes, including novel microbial taxa not found in industrialized populations (Clemente et al., 2015; Gomez et al., 2016; Obregon-Tito et al., 2015; Schnorr et al., 2014; Smits et al., 2017; Yatsunenko”
Effect of Diet on the Gut Microbiota: Rethinking Intervention Duration (2019, background): “In 2017, researchers collected 350 faecal samples from the Tanzanian Hadza tribe over the span of a year [76].”
American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research (2018, neutral): “(25); and (iv) samples from the Hadza hunter-gatherers for additional context (22).”
Gut Microbiota-Targeted Diets Modulate Human Immune Status (2020, neutral): “, 2017), but has also been associated with low-fiber diets and is rare in populations consuming traditional diets (Earle et al., 2015; Desai et al., 2016; Smits et al., 2017).”