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Boffins have launched an urgent hunt for poop from remote people who haven’t adopted modern lifestyles, hoping their poo can help solve a host of conditions from IBD to Parkinson’s
Scientists are now convinced that the bugs in our guts could unlock treatments for everything from IBD to Parkinson’s disease – but they need poo from the world’s most isolated places to find the cures we desperately need.
A team from Germany’s Kiel University and Malaysia’s Universiti Malaya contacted remote Bajau sea nomads near Borneo in October, offering cash for poop, reports National Geographic.
The boffins believe the bugs on the skin and in the digestive tracts of these traditional people can help us in the industrialised world undo the changes to our ‘microbiome’ that leave us prey to a host of “skyrocketing” problems, says Rob Knight, who directs the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California, San Diego.
“The question is whether the diseases that we have now that are skyrocketing in prevalence—like obesity, like diabetes, like liver disease, some forms of cancer, even some neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s—are in part due to deficiencies of microbes that we can resupply,” he said.
Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMbC) is building a biobank of poo samples from remote populations. For almost a decade the GMbC has collecting poop from Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, ranging from Tanzanian tribespeople to Inuit in the Arctic Circle.
The centre hopes to better understand the impact of industrialization, processed diets, and antibiotics on human health. Globally, over 10 million people suffer from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), chronic inflammation in the gut that manifests as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. Evidence linking these two conditions to abnormalities in the gut microbiome has steadily grown.
Differences in gut bacteria have also been found in sufferers of conditions from autism and type 2 diabetes to heart failure, cancer, anxiety, arthritis, and more.
Many bugs evolved with us over millions of years and operate like tiny chemical factories, although experts are still unsure whether microbial changes cause or result from diseases. GMbC hopes to solve the mystery but needs more poop.
The centre’s growing poo archive, housed in freezers in Germany, now has almost 2,000 samples from about 50 communities worldwide, ranging from urban centres in industrialised countries to remote villages. The samples have revealed thousands of new bacterial species. Nearly 10,000 bacterial strains have been shared with scientists around the world.
A French husband-and-wife team launched GMbC and oversees its poo library. Mathieu Groussin and Mathilde Poyet aim to bring underrepresented human populations into microbiome science and uncover the full biodiversity of the human gut microbiome around the globe.
Their poop hunt began with a paper on the Hadza, a remote tribe of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers who still live like early humans. Research compared poo from 27 tribespeople, living on honey, berries, baobab fruit, tubers, antelope, monkeys, bushpigs, and baboons, to the bugs in the tums of 16 Italians living in Bologna, as well as farmers in Burkina Faso and Malawi.
The Hadza had loads of different bugs, while the Western microbiome appeared as depleted and diseased as that of an IBD patient. And the researchers fear this lack of bacteria could put us at risk.
Humans and their microbes have evolved together over millions of years. A microbe in Japan lets people digest seaweed. Another in Africa helps people extract energy from tough, fibrous tubers.
Some microbes send signals that can speed up or slow down metabolism. Others produce essential vitamins, influence appetite, regulate blood sugar, and help train and support our immune system. Newer evidence suggests our microbiomes can even alter our brains, making us more outgoing or affecting our mood and how we react to stress.
But antibiotics and antimicrobial soaps, along with changes to our diet, has killed off many of our allies. The loss of microbial diversity, the researchers suggest, has “had a drastic effect on health and immune function of modern Westernized human groups.”
The poop hunt faces several hurdles, however, before it can start fixing the woes of modern living. Boffins don’t yet know how to turn helpful bacteria into effective cures. They’re worried, too, about using bugs from remote populations without the tribespeople’s permission.
Researchers are also in a race to gather far-flung poop before remote people abandon their traditional lifestyles. But Groussin is convinced the poo search will bring results.
“We’re just starting,” he told National Geographic. “We will find something.”
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