You may have heard about the microbiome, that collection of microorganisms that fill the world around, and in, us. You may have had some digestive tract issues after a round of antibiotics wreaked havoc with your gut microbiome. You may have read about the rafts of research that are making it clearer that our health is directly impacted by what is going on with our microbiome. You may even take probiotics to try to encourage the health of your microbiome.
Our microbiome is all around us. Credit: Bing Image Creator
But you
probably don’t realize how interconnected our microbiomes are.
Research published in Nature
by Beghini, et. al., mapped microbiomes of almost 2,000 individuals in 18
scattered Honduras villages. “We found substantial evidence of microbiome
sharing happening among people who are not family and who don’t live together,
even after accounting for other factors like diet, water sources, and
medications,” said
co-lead author Francesco Beghini, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Human
Nature Lab. “In fact, microbiome sharing was the strongest predictor of
people’s social relationships in the villages we studied, beyond
characteristics like wealth, religion, or education.”
“Think of
how different social niches form at a place like Yale,” said co-lead author
Jackson Pullman. “You have friend groups centered on things like theater, or
crew, or being physics majors. Our study indicates that the people composing
these groups may be connected in ways we never previously thought, even through
their microbiomes.”
“What’s so
fascinating is that we’re so interconnected,” said
Mr. Pullman. “Those connections go beyond the social level to the microbial
level.”
Credit: Beghini, et. alia |
Professor
Christakis thinks the findings are of broad importance, telling
Science Alert: "We believe our findings are of generic
relevance, not bound to the specific location we did this work, shedding light
on how human social interactions shape the nature and impact of the microbes in
our bodies." But, he added: "The sharing of microbes per se is
neither good nor bad, but the sharing of particular microbes in particular
circumstances can indeed be good or bad.”
This
research reminded me of 2015
research by Meadow, et. al., that suggested our microbiome doesn’t just
exist in our gut, inside other parts our body, and on our skin, but that, in
fact, we’re surrounded by a “personal microbial cloud.” Remember the Peanuts
character Pigpen, who walked
around in his personal dirt cloud? Well, that’s each of us, only instead of
dirt we’re surrounded by our microbial cloud – and those clouds are easily discernable
from each other.
We're all like that, but with a microbiome cloud. Credit: Charles M. Schulz |
Dr. Meadow
told BBC at the time:
"We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the
air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most
of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud."
Those researchers predicted:
While indoors, we are constantly interacting with microbes other people have left behind on the chairs in which we sit, in dust we perturb, and on every surface we touch. These human-microbial interactions are in addition to the microbes our pets leave in our houses, those that blow off of tree leaves and soils, those in the food we eat and the water we drink. It is becoming increasingly clear that we have evolved with these complex microbial interactions, and that we may depend on them for our well-being (Rook, 2013). It is now apparent, given the results presented here, that the microbes we encounter include those actively emitted by other humans, including our families, coworkers, and perfect strangers.
Dr. Beghini
and colleagues would agree, and further suggest that it’s not only indoors
where we’re sharing microbes.
I would be
remiss if I didn’t point out new
research which found that our brains, far from being sterile, are host to a
diverse microbiome and that impacts to it may lead to Alzheimer’s and other
forms of dementia.
Could we catch
Alzheimer’s from someone else’s personal microbiome cloud? It’s possible. Could we prevent or even cure
it by careful curation of the brain (or gut) microbiome? Again, possible.
The truth
is that, despite decades of understanding that we have a microbiome, we still
have a very limited understanding of what a healthy microbiome is, what causes
it to not be healthy, what problems arise for us when it isn’t healthy, or what
we can do to bring it (and us) to more optimal health. We’re still struggling
to understand where besides our gut it plays a crucial role.
We now
know that we can “share” parts of our microbiome with those around us, but not
quite what the mechanisms for that are – e.g., touch, sharing objects, or having
our personal clouds intersect.
We feel
like we are where scientists were two hundred years ago in the early stages of
the germ theory of disease. They knew germs impacted health, they even could
connect some specific germs with specific diseases, they even had rudimentary interventions
based on it, but much remained to be discovered. That led to vaccines,
antibiotics, and other pharmaceuticals, all of which gave us “modern medicine,”
but failed to anticipate the importance of the microbiome on our health.
Similarly,
we’re justifiably proud of the progress we’ve made in terms of understanding
our genetic structure and its impacts on our health, but fall far short of
recognizing the vastly larger genetic footprint of the microbiome with which we
co-exist.
A few
years ago I called for “quantum
theory of health” – not literally, but incorporating and surpassing “modern
medicine” in the way that quantum physics upended classical physics. That kind
of revolution would recognize that there is no health for us without our
microbiome, and that “our microbiome” includes some portion of the microbiomes
of those around us. We talk about “personalized
medicine,” but a quantum breakthrough for health would be treating each person
as the symbiosis with our unique microbiome.
We won’t
get to 22nd century medicine until we can assess the microbiome in
which we exist and offer interventions to optimize it. I just hope we don’t
have to wait until the 22nd century to achieve that.
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