An African origin for the intimate association between humans and Helicobacter pylori
By B. Linz, François Balloux, Y. Moodley, Andrea Manica, Hua Liu, P. Roumagnac, Daniel Falush, C. Stamer, F. Prugnolle, S. W. van der Merwe and 6 more. Nature, 2007
964 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Infection of the stomach by Helicobacter pylori is ubiquitous among humans. However, although H. pylori strains from different geographic areas are associated with clear phylogeographic differentiation, the age of an association between these bacteria with humans remains highly controversial. Here we show, using sequences from a large data set of bacterial strains that, as in humans, genetic diversity in H. pylori decreases with geographic distance from east Africa, the cradle of modern humans. We also observe similar clines of genetic isolation by distance (IBD) for both H. pylori and its human host at a worldwide scale. Like humans, simulations indicate that H. pylori seems to have spread from east Africa around 58,000 yr ago. Even at more restricted geographic scales, where IBD tends to become blurred, principal component clines in H. pylori from Europe strongly resemble the classical clines for Europeans described by Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues. Taken together, our results establish that anatomically modern humans were already infected by H. pylori before their migrations from Africa and demonstrate that H. pylori has remained intimately associated with their human host populations ever since.
Subfields: Epidemiology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Surgery
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afc548dd39ee53ec9e1bad910558161b6103fafb
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Citations in the corpus
- Microbiome and Malignancy (2011, background): “pylori is ancestral in humans, colonizing our ancestors before the major out-of-Africa migration 58,000 years ago (Linz et al., 2007).”
- The Impact of the Gut Microbiota on Human Health: An Integrative View (2012, neutral): “A Gram-negative pathogen linked with gastric ulcers and stomach cancer, H. pylori has been associated with humans for at least 58,000 years, although most of us carry it asymptomatically (Linz et al., 2007).”
- A demographic model for Palaeolithic technological evolution: The case of East Asia and the Movius Line (2010, background): “…in the case of human stomach bacteria (Helicobacter pylori), suggesting that the demographic consequences of human global dispersal also had an effect on the population genetics of these ‘hitchhiking’ bacterial populations, as humans carried them out of Africa in their stomachs (Linz et al., 2007).”
- Extending and improving metagenomic taxonomic profiling with uncharacterized species using MetaPhlAn 4 (2023, result): “…pairs of strains sampled in different countries, we found a correlation between geographic and median genetic distance (Spearman’s P = 0.505) that can be used to hypothesize isolation-by-distance effects 75 , as previously shown for Helicobacter pylori 76 and Eubacterium rectale 55 (Fig.”
- Development of the Human Infant Intestinal Microbiota (2007, result): “Common environmental exposures are likely to include the maternal vaginal, fecal, or skin microbiota, as is suggested by the observed similarity of some infants’ early stool microbiota to these samples, which is consistent with previous evidence of vertical transmission of microbes [33,47,48].”
- The human gut microbiome: ecology and recent evolutionary changes. (2011, background): “pylori is associated with humans (49), and H.”