MIND THE GUT · Molecular Markers of Microbiome Evolution

Mind the Gut: Molecular Markers of Microbiome Evolution

Does microbiome evolution reflect major events of human history? The human gut microbiome consists of billions of beneficial bacteria, which profoundly affect health through their impact on metabolism, immunity and behavior. Despite its major role in human health, little is known about how the human microbiome evolved and its changing ecology. Further, the extent to which human evolution has impacted gut microbiomes through genetic mutations, population migrations and changes in lifestyle is poorly understood. These limitations prevent us from accurately defining a healthy human-microbes association, and from understanding how gut microbiomes have shaped our species. However, understanding the co-evolution of the man-gut community is more complex than a simple binary present-to-past comparison and requires a time-series approach associated with the determining moments in human evolution, e.g., migrations, admixture, domestication and industrialization. Current research on extant populations combined with the study of paleo-faeces and preserved stomach contents has potential to reveal the microbial impact of specific environmental and lifestyle changes that occurred throughout human history and prehistory and the role that these factors may have played in the evolution of the microbiome. MIND THE GUT (MtG) approached these questions by building a new analytical tool (lipid biomarkers, faecal proteomes and DNA) to advance the study of the ancestral human microbiome in 3 different microbiome substrates: modern and mummified material, and reference faecal material in different stages of degradation. The overall objectives of the project were to develop new markers of specific bacterial action applying lipidomic and proteomic tools to explore the diagenesis of microbiome substrates. MtG analyzed the mummified microbiomes of the aboriginal Canary islanders. For the first time, a combined multiomic analysis was used to approach the study of ancestral microbiomes, showing its potential to understand ancient microbiomes. The analysis of lipids, proteins and DNA from mummified tissues has revelead similarities with modern non-industrialized populations and has showed potential to illuminate the life, diet and diseases of ancient populations. In another first, this project has been able to generate a multiomic dataset from the oldest human coprolites, revelaing the origin, diet, microbiome and disease of these 50.000-years-old individuals. Some of the project results have been already published in journals such as Cell, and presented in international conferences. The remaining results will be disseminated soon in a series of manuscripts submitted to field specific journals (methodological) and general journals for the findings related with the microbiome, pathologies and lifestyle.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union