In a remote part of the Venezuelan Amazon, scientists have discovered that members of a village isolated from the modern world have the most diverse colonies of bacteria ever reported living in and on the human body.
The microbiome — the trillions of mostly beneficial bacteria that share our bodies — plays a critical role in maintaining health. Friday’s study raises tantalizing questions about the microbial diversity of our ancestors, and whether today’s Western diets and lifestyles strip us of some bugs we might want back.
Most surprising, this group of Yanomami indigenous people harbored bacteria containing genes with the ability to resist antibiotic treatment, even though the villagers presumably were never exposed to commercial medications.
This isolated population offers “a unique opportunity to put our microbial past under the microscope,” said lead researcher Jose Clemente, an assistant genetics professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
The results bolster a theory that diminished microbial diversity in Western populations is linked to immune and metabolic diseases — allergies, asthma, diabetes — that are on the rise, said senior author Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello of NYU Langone Medical Center.
Everyone carries a customized set of microbes that live in our noses and mouths, on our skin and in our intestines. This microbial zoo starts forming at birth and varies depending on where you live, your diet, if you had a vaginal birth or a C-section and antibiotic exposure.
Most of what scientists know about the human microbiome comes from studies of Americans, such as the US government’s Human Microbiome Project, or of Europeans. However, increasingly, scientists are attempting to compare non-Western populations, especially those that keep traditional lifestyles like the isolated Yanomami.
The Yanomami continue to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in rainforests and mountains along the border of Venezuela and Brazil, and as a group are fairly well-known. However, Friday’s research, reported in the journal Science Advances, stems from the discovery of a previously unmapped Yanomami village in the mountains of southern Venezuela. Researchers are not disclosing the village’s name for privacy reasons, but say it was first visited by a Venezuelan medical expedition in 2009 that collected fecal, skin and mouth swab samples from 34 villagers.
Scientists compared the bacterial DNA from those villagers with samples from US populations and found the Americans’ microbiomes are about 40 percent less diverse. The Yanomami’s microbiomes also were more diverse than samples from two other indigenous populations with more exposure to Western culture — the Guahibo community of Venezuela and rural Malawi communities in southeast Africa.
The Yanomami harbored some unique bacteria with beneficial health effects, such as helping to prevent the formation of kidney stones, the researchers reported.
Then genetic testing uncovered silent antibiotic-resistant genes lurking in some bacterial strains. Antibiotics could still kill the bugs, but when the genes were switched on, by antibiotic exposure, they could block activity of some common modern antibiotics, said study co-author Guatam Dantas of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.
Today, exposure to antibiotics in medicine or agriculture spurs germs to become harder to treat. However, bacteria in soil were a natural source of early antibiotics, Dantas said, and probably these villagers at some point picked up those bugs which had evolved resistance genes as a defense from competitors. He said it suggests people have a natural reservoir of genes that might have other duties, but that can activate to trigger drug resistance in the right environment.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not