This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The totality of bacteria, viruses and fungi that exist in and on a multicellular organism forms its natural microbiome. The interactions between the body and these microorganisms significantly influence the host organism's functions and health.
Among other things, researchers have shown that the microbiome plays an important role in defense against pathogens. On the other hand, they suspect that imbalances in the microbiome's composition are linked to the development of so-called environmental diseases, such as chronic inflammation. Yet several key questions in microbiome research remain unanswered: What exactly constitutes a healthy microbiome?
Which internal and external factors can alter it? And how does it differ between people, especially those with different lifestyles and in different geographic regions? At Kiel University's Medical Faculty and the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), Campus Kiel, professor Mathilde Poyet from the Institute of Experimental Medicine (IEM) and professor Mathieu Groussin from the Institute for Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) are working on these challenges together with their research groups.
Based on the hypothesis that microbiomes differ depending on the origin of a population group, they are specifically investigating how geography, lifestyle and the degree of industrialization affect the microbial colonization of the human gut. To tackle these questions, they founded the Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMbC) 10 years ago. This global scientific initiative is committed, through the worldwide collection of microbial samples, to studying and conserving the full diversity of the human gut microbiome.
The Kiel-based researchers, who lead the Kiel Metaorganism Center (KMC) as part of Kiel University's priority research area Kiel Life Science (KLS), are also active in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1182 "Origin and Function of Metaorganisms," and the Cluster of Excellence "Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation" (PMI). They have published two papers in collaboration with a number of international experts. In these publications, they have systematically analyzed key factors such as geography, lifestyle, diet and genetics as cumulative effects of civilization on the human microbiome and individual gut bacteria.
In particular, they revealed that industrialization and the associated lifestyle changes lead to a drastic depletion and strong homogenization in the biodiversity of the microbiome. Furthermore, the Kiel research team demonstrated that, in addition to perturbations observed at the level of microbial communities, individual microbial genomes also mutate in response to the level of industrialization of the host. For instance, a heavily industrialized lifestyle results in an increase in the size of bacterial genomes due to increased genetic exchange between microbes.
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