Scientists call for the creation of a microbial "Noah's Ark" to protect global health

A team of researchers led by Rutgers University and New Brunswick is calling for the creation of a global safe for the microbiota to protect the long-term health of humankind.

This Noah's Ark made of beneficial germs would be collected from human populations whose microbiomes are not compromised by antibiotics, processed diets and other detrimental effects of modern society, which have contributed to a massive loss of microbial diversity and an increase in health problems. The human microbiome groups together billions of microscopic organisms that live in and on our bodies, contributing to our health in many ways.

The researchers, who describe their proposal this week in the newspaper Science, compare their idea to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world's largest crop collection created in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.

"We are facing a growing global health crisis, which requires capturing and preserving the diversity of the human microbiota as long as it still exists," said Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, lead author and professor in the Department of Law. Rutgers-New Brunswick. Biochemistry and Microbiology and Department of Anthropology. "These microbes have co-evolved with humans over hundreds of millennia, they help us digest food, strengthen our immune system and protect us from invading germs." For a handful of generations, we've witnessed an astounding loss of microbial diversity linked to a global outbreak of immune and other disorders. "

Dominguez-Bello and his co-authors – Rob Knight of the University of California at San Diego, Jack A. Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Martin J. Blaser of the Langone Medical Center of New University York – said that it might be possible someday to prevent the disease by reintroducing lost germs. But this could only happen if researchers first collected useful microbes from isolated populations in Latin America and Africa with the greatest diversity of microbiota, before experiencing the effects of urbanization. People living in urbanized societies have lost a substantial part of their diversity in microbiota; The intestinal flora of most Americans, for example, is half as diverse as that of hunter-gatherers in remote Amazonian villages.

An international effort, including significant funding, would be needed to collect and store the microbes collected in a global repository.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, diseases and disorders such as obesity, asthma, allergies and autism have increased significantly, first in the industrialized world and more recently in developing countries. Scientific evidence increasingly indicates that microbiota disturbances at the beginning of life and the resulting metabolic abnormalities during development are essential contributing factors. The costs of treating obesity and diabetes have surpassed the trillion dollars, leading the authors to compare global microbial loss with climate change in terms of importance for the future of the world. humanity.

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More information:
"Preserving microbial diversity" Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi… 1126 / science.aau8816