Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers

By Stephanie L. Schnorr, M. Candela, S. Rampelli, Manuela Centanni, C. Consolandi, Giulia Basaglia, S. Turroni, E. Biagi, C. Peano, M. Severgnini and 9 more. Nature Communications, 2014

1,206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human gut microbiota directly influences health and provides an extra means of adaptive potential to different lifestyles. To explore variation in gut microbiota and to understand how these bacteria may have co-evolved with humans, here we investigate the phylogenetic diversity and metabolite production of the gut microbiota from a community of human hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of Tanzania. We show that the Hadza have higher levels of microbial richness and biodiversity than Italian urban controls. Further comparisons with two rural farming African groups illustrate other features unique to Hadza that can be linked to a foraging lifestyle. These include absence of Bifidobacterium and differences in microbial composition between the sexes that probably reflect sexual division of labour. Furthermore, enrichment in Prevotella, Treponema and unclassified Bacteroidetes, as well as a peculiar arrangement of Clostridiales taxa, may enhance the Hadza’s ability to digest and extract valuable nutrition from fibrous plant foods. Gut microbes influence our health and may contribute to human adaptation to different lifestyles. Here, the authors describe the gut microbiome of a community of hunter-gatherers and identify unique features that could be linked to a foraging lifestyle.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Molecular Biology, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f158bbb2909d1d6f0dc9ab1a3a636d9ab909c9d

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Citations in the corpus

Age-related changes in gut microbiota composition from newborn to centenarian: a cross-sectional study (2016, background): “Furthermore, although abundant data on gut microbiota composition are available in some public databases, sequential changes cannot be evaluated with these public data because of biases stemming from differences in study methods, especially in DNA extraction [16, 17], and nationality differences amo”
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”
The healthy human microbiome (2016, background): “Given the typical observation of increased microbiome diversity in health, it has been hypothesized [111] that developed countries’ consistently reduced gut microbial diversities may account for higher chronic disease rates relative to those seen in developing countries and primitive societies [66, ”
Blautia—a new functional genus with potential probiotic properties? (2021, background): “Notably, Blautia was significantly enriched in the BB-type intestinal microbiota, accounting for 10% of the total BB-type bacterial composition but only 5% of the total P-type bacterial composition.6 Schnorr et al.62 found a difference in the intestinal microbial composition between Hadza and Italia”
The first 1000 cultured species of the human gastrointestinal microbiota (2014, background): “…a recent study of the microbiota of the Hazda tribe from Tanzania suggested that these adult huntergatherers do not carry any Bifidobacterium spp., which was explained by absence of dietary components such as meat and dairy that could support growth of these bacteria (Schnorr et al., 2014).”
Bifidobacteria or fiber protect against diet-induced microbiota-mediated colonic mucus deterioration (2017, background): “High intake of WSD is not only associated with obesity and metabolic disease but also with an altered and less diverse gut microbiota composition (Cotillard et al., 2013; Filippo et al., 2010; Schnorr et al., 2014; Sonnenburg et al., 2016; Yatsunenko et al., 2012).”