U.S. immigration westernizes the human gut microbiome
By P. Vangay, A. Johnson, Tonya L. Ward, Gabriel A. Al-Ghalith, Robin R. Shields-Cutler, Benjamin M Hillmann, S. Lucas, Lalit K. Beura, E. Thompson, L. Till and 14 more. Cell, 2018
637 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary Many United States immigrant populations develop metabolic diseases post-immigration, but the causes are not well understood. Although the microbiome plays a role in metabolic disease, there have been no studies measuring the effects of U.S. immigration on the gut microbiome. We collected stool, dietary recalls, and anthropometrics from 514 Hmong and Karen individuals living in Thailand and the U.S., including first- and second-generation immigrants and 19 Karen individuals sampled before and after immigration, as well as from 36 U.S.-born European American individuals. Using 16S and deep shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing, we found that migration from a non-Western country to the U.S. is associated with immediate loss of gut microbiome diversity and function, in which U.S.-associated strains and functions displace native strains and functions. These effects increase with duration of U.S. residence, and are compounded by obesity and across generations.
Subfields: Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fcec01aeed4b1b584359015b14e2b47f48b7344
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In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Gut Microbiome: Profound Implications for Diet and Disease (2019, background): “was shown to reduce gut microbial diversity and function [12].”
- Effect of Diet on the Gut Microbiota: Rethinking Intervention Duration (2019, background): “A 2018 study of US first and second-generation immigrants were observed to have lost fibre-degrading bacterial enzymes that may have been associated with a reduction in dietary fibre consumption after migration from Southeast Asia [104].”