Member-only story
Many types of gut bacteria acquired in early life remains in the gut for decades
Quick summary: A recent twin study illustrates why the types of bacteria you acquire at birth and in early life are so important — because they may last decades!
Wow. As a twin myself — I find this research fascinating!
A recent twin study illustrates why the types of bacteria you acquire at birth and in early life are so important — because they may last a lifetime!
The recent study by Li et al., (2021) used data from the TwinsUk cohort.
The scientists analysed 1004 gut microbiome samples from elderly twins (senior adults around 65 years old).
The researchers found that a minor proportion of gut bacteria acquired early in life remain in the gut for many decades.
The results:
From the abstract: “We identified the rare genomic variants (single nucleotide variation and indels) for 27 prevalent species with enough sequencing coverage for confident genomic variant identification.
We found that for some species, twin pairs, including both monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins, share significantly more rare variants than unrelated subject pairs”
The conclusion:
