Evolution of human took
million years and trillions of microbes have followed too in this journey
according to a new research published recently in the journal Science.
The work also highlights that we have missed many microbes too in our long
evolutionary journey and some of them still inhabit in our early cousin apes.
This might open gates of some human diseases as the study believes.
Researchers have been
trying to find the coorelation between the gut microbes and human behaviour,
disease, health, etc. But where from these microbes came?
To unveil this mystery,
Andrew Moeller (currently a post doc at University of California, Berkeley) as
a part of his doctoral dissertation in evolutionary biology studied gut
bacteria isolated from the faeces of 47
chimpanzees of Tanzania, 24 bonobos of Democratic Republic of Congo, 24
gorillas from Cameroon and also from 16humans of Connecticut. Moeller along
with his colleagues compared the DNA sequences of every rapidly evolving genes
that is common in the gut bacteria of apes and in humans. Post analysing they segregated
DNA gene sequences and put into family trees.
It was found that most
of the gut microbes have been residing and evolving along with us for longer time.
Moeller finds two of three major families of gut bacteria from apes and humans
share a common ancestor more than 15million years ago.
“It’s surprising that
our gut microbes, which we could get from many sources in the environment, have
actually been coevolving inside us for such a long time,” says project leader
Howard Ochman, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin to Science.
For deeper
understanding in their final experiment, they looked into human microbiome by
comparing DNA sequences between people from Connecticut and Malawi. It was
found that bacterial strains from Africans diverged from American far about 1.7
million years ago. Moeller beliefs that gut bacteria can also be used to trace
human and animal migrations.
The work “represents a
significant step in understanding human microbiota coevolutionary history,”
says Justin Sonnenburg of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was
not involved with the research. “It elegantly shows that gut microbes are
passed vertically, between generations over millions of years.” Microbiologist
Martin Blaser of New York University in New York City agrees: “The path of
transmission was from mom apes to baby apes for hundreds of thousands of
generations at least.” – Reported from Science.
Source: Science
Magazine
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