The huge diversity of the gut microbiome of Hadza hunter-gatherers from Tanzania hints at how industrialisation has influenced the variety of people’s internal microbe communities
By Jason Arunn Murugesu
21 June 2023
The Hadza people in Tanzania have very diverse gut microbiomes, which may be down to their traditional lifestyle
Kairi Aun/Getty Images
More than a thousand novel microorganism species that inhabit the gut have been discovered in the Hadza hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania. These contribute to a gut microbe diversity that is much greater than that of people in California, showing how industrialisation might have reduced microbiome diversity.
Matthew Carter at Stanford University in California and his colleagues genetically sequenced 351 faecal samples from 167 people in the Hadza community to gain a better sense of how lifestyle affects our gut microbiomes.
“We know that our gut microbiome is critically important, for example, in dictating aspects of our biology, our immune status and our metabolism,” says Justin Sonnenburg, a co-author of the study, also at Stanford University.
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The researchers used ultra-deep metagenomic sequencing, a type of genetic analysis that gives an idea of the species present and what their potential functions may be.
They compared their findings to sequencing they conducted on the gut microbiomes of 12 people in California and 56 people in Nepal from a range of communities.