Gut check

A European research consortium just reported their analysis of gut microbiome diversity in 39 individuals from Europe, Japan and the United States. The figure below summarizes their findings: that the “metagenomes” of fecal communities cluster into three recognizable “enterotypes”, each dominated by a different genus (Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Ruminococcus).

This must be important, because it was published in Nature and extensively covered in the media, right? Probably, but the meaning and importance of these findings await much more work to correlate health and disease states with the composition and function of different microbial communities. To my simple mind, these findings suggest that perturbing the gut flora with antimicrobial therapy likely has a wide variety of adverse consequences, most of which we don’t yet understand.

Until we learn more, we’ll have to be satisfied with some of the straightforward correlations that these investigators uncovered. For example, in the words of one of the authors:

"If I have a stool sample I can tell how old you are," says Bork. "That seems useless because you already know how old you are…”