What are the consequences of the disappearing human microbiota?

By Martin J. Blaser, Stanley Falkow. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2009

849 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humans and our ancestors have evolved since the most ancient times with a commensal microbiota. The conservation of indicator species in a niche-specific manner across all of the studied human population groups suggests that the microbiota confer conserved benefits on humans. Nevertheless, certain of these organisms have pathogenic properties and, through medical practices and lifestyle changes, their prevalence in human populations is changing, often to an extreme degree. In this Essay, we propose that the disappearance of these ancestral indigenous organisms, which are intimately involved in human physiology, is not entirely beneficial and has consequences that might include post-modern conditions such as obesity and asthma.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Molecular Biology, Nutrition and Dietetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4e2b19fe0a68a72c685a84061ba8164131f8f43

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Citations in the corpus

Microbiome and Malignancy (2011, background): “We are living at a time of great ecological change; global warming at the macro-level and “disappearing microbiota” at the micro-level (Blaser and Falkow, 2009).”
Viral and Bacterial Interactions in the Upper Respiratory Tract (2013, background): “In a balanced state, this ecosystem as a part of the complete human microbiome is assumed to play a major beneficial role for the human host [5].”
Antibiotics in early life alter the murine colonic microbiome and adiposity (2012, methodology): “Quality-filtered sequences (see Supplementary Methods) were pre-processed through the QIIME pipeline(51) involving: (1) clustering the sequences into operational taxonomical units (OTUs) using the UCLUST program(52) at a 97% similarity threshold; (2) taxonomically assigning each OTU by selecting a r”
U.S. immigration westernizes the human gut microbiome (2018, positive): “This loss of indigenous microbes or ‘‘disappearing microbiota’’ (Blaser and Falkow, 2009) may be critical in explaining the rise of chronic diseases in the modern world.”
The Hologenome Concept: Human, Animal and Plant Microbiota (2014, background): “, Brown, L. W., Cao, S., et al. (2012). A bacterial sulfonolipid triggers multicellular development in the closest living relatives of animals. eLife, 1, e00013. Andersson, S. G. E., Zomorodipour, A., Andesson, J. O., et al. (1998). The genome sequence of Rickettsia prowazekii and the origin of mito”
Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers (2014, background): “157 | C h a p t e r 4 with major health implications, particularly now that the human gastro-intestinal tract is increasingly recognized as the gateway to pathogenic, metabolic, and immunologic diseases (Blaser and Falkow, 2009).”
Natural history of the infant gut microbiome and impact of antibiotic treatments on strain-level diversity and stability (2015, background): “Subtherapeutic antibiotic doses lead to increased body mass in both farm animals (52) and laboratory mice (53).”
Microorganisms with Claimed Probiotic Properties: An Overview of Recent Literature (2014, background): “Although it is a scientific fact that certain microorganisms can kill us, the questions arise: do certain microorganisms also keep us alive? Would it be more correct to imply that the post-modern rise of conditions and diseases such as obesity, celiac disease, asthma, allergy syndromes, type 1 diabe”
Defining a healthy human gut microbiome: current concepts, future directions, and clinical applications. (2012, background): “Excessive use of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, IBD, allergies, and asthma, which have increased dramatically in many populations over the past few decades (Blaser and Falkow, 2009).”
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, ”
Impact of antibiotics on the human microbiome and consequences for host health (2022, background): “Blaser and Falkow (2009) have suggested a link between the “missing microbes” and modern conditions such as obesity and juvenile diabetes.”
Starving our Microbial Self: The Deleterious Consequences of a Diet Deficient in Microbiota-Accessible Carbohydrates (2014, positive): “It is possible that the new microbiota configuration resulting from modern diet and lifestyle presents incompatibilities with our human biology, the ill effects of which contribute significantly to many modern diseases (Figure 3B) (Blaser and Falkow, 2009).”
Incomplete recovery and individualized responses of the human distal gut microbiota to repeated antibiotic perturbation (2010, background): “More generally, there is a concern that altering the composition of the microbiota will interfere with some of the human–microbe interactions that are integral to human physiology (6).”
Gut microbiome, obesity, and metabolic dysfunction. (2011, background): “In that context, does a “disappearing microbiota”, as recently proposed by Blaser and Falkow (4), play a role in obesity and its consequences?”