Our gut microbiome — the ever-changing “rainforest” of bacteria living in our intestines — is primarily affected by our lifestyle, including what we eat or the medications we take, most studies show. But a University of Notre Dame study has found a much greater genetic component at play than was once known.
In the study, published recently in Science, researchers discovered that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are heritable after looking at more than 16,000 gut microbiome profiles collected over 14 years from a long-studied population of baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. However, this heritability changes over time, across seasons and with age. The team also found that several of the microbiome traits heritable in baboons are also heritable in humans.
“The environme...
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