Excellent article in this week's Economist magazine about
the latest research on gut flora.
www.economist.com/node/21560559www.economist.com/node/21560523Human microbiomes are dominated by just four of these phyla: the Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. Clearly, living inside a human being is a specialised existence that is appropriate only to certain types of bug.
Specialised; but not monotonous. Just as ecosystems such as forests, grasslands and coral reefs differ from place to place, so it is with microbiomes. Those of children in Malawi and rural Venezuela, for instance, contain more riboflavin-producing bugs than do those of North Americans. They are also better at extracting nutrition from mother’s milk because they turn out lots of an enzyme known as glycoside hydrolase. This converts carbohydrates called glycans, of which milk has many, into usable sugars.