The combination of billions of microbes that occupy our digestive system is practically unique in each individual. Random? Absolutely. Analyzing the genetic material of the entire microbe community ( microbiome ) of various pairs of twins and twins, American scientists have found that there is a great similarity between siblings, regardless of whether they are identical or not. "Exposure to a certain environment at the beginning of our life plays a key role in the microbes that colonize our stomach and intestine," concludes Jeffrey Gordon, director of the Center for Genomic Sciences at the University of Washington (USA), in an article published by the journal Nature . The genes of these microbes, he adds, are complementary to our own DNA. And together they form the so-called "metagenome" .
But how important is it to identify these digestive squats? Much, as Professor Gordon has found. Among other things, because there are 300 bacterial genes that, when present in large quantities in our digestive system, increase the predisposition to obesity . "There is a clear relationship between obesity and the efficiency with which the bacteria in our digestive system extract energy," says the researcher, who now intends to find out how diet and other aspects of current lifestyle can affect the composition of the microbiome.
