Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 46, Pages 16431-16435Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1419136111
Keywords
microbiota; gastrointestinal tract; coevolution; Pan; Gorilla
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R01 AI091595, R37 AI050529, R01 AI58715, P30 AI045008, R01 GM101209]
- National Science Foundation [2011119472]
- Agence Nationale de Recherche sur le Sida [ANRS 12125/12182/12255]
- Jane Goodall Institute
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Integrative Organismal Systems [1052693] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Humans are ecosystems containing trillions of microorganisms, but the evolutionary history of this microbiome is obscured by a lack of knowledge about microbiomes of African apes. We sequenced the gut communities of hundreds of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas and developed a phylogenetic approach to reconstruct how present-day human microbiomes have diverged from those of ancestral populations. Compositional change in the microbiome was slow and clock-like during African ape diversification, but human microbiomes have deviated from the ancestral state at an accelerated rate. Relative to the microbiomes of wild apes, human microbiomes have lost ancestral microbial diversity while becoming specialized for animal-based diets. Individual wild apes cultivate more phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species of bacteria than do individual humans across a range of societies. These results indicate that humanity has experienced a depletion of the gut flora since diverging from Pan.
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