罗格斯大学-新不伦瑞克领导的研究团队呼吁建立一个全球微生物库, 以保护人类的长期健康。
研究人员在本周的《科学》杂志上概述了他们的建议, 将他们的想法比作 "斯瓦尔巴特全球种子库", 这是世界上最大的农作物多样性集合, 是在自然灾害或人为灾害的情况下创造的。
"我们面临着日益严重的全球健康危机, 这要求我们在仍然存在的情况下捕捉和保护人类微生物群的多样性," Dominguez --新不伦瑞克的研究生物化学和微生物学和人类学系的首席作者兼教授。"这些微生物与人类共同进化了千百年。它们帮助我们消化食物, 增强我们的免疫系统, 防止入侵病菌。在少数几代人看来, 微生物多样性的巨大损失与全球免疫和其他疾病的激增有关。
A Rutgers University-New Brunswick-led team of researchers is calling for the creation of a global microbiota vault to protect the long-term health of humanity.
Such a Noah's Ark of beneficial germs would be gathered from human populations whose microbiomes are uncompromised by antibiotics, processed diets and other ill effects of modern society, which have contributed to a massive loss of microbial diversity and an accompanying rise in health problems. The human microbiome includes the trillions of microscopic organisms that live in and on our bodies, contributing to our health in a myriad of ways.
The researchers, who outline their proposal this week in the journal Science, liken their idea to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world's largest collection of crop diversity created in case of natural or human-made disasters.
"We're facing a growing global health crisis, which requires that we capture and preserve the diversity of the human microbiota while it still exists," said Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, the lead author and a professor in Rutgers-New Brunswick's Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology and Department of Anthropology. "These microbes co-evolved with humans over hundreds of millennia. They help us digest food, strengthen our immune system and protect against invading germs. Over a handful of generations, we have seen a staggering loss in microbial diversity linked with a worldwide spike in immune and other disorders."
Dominguez-Bello and her coauthors -- Rob Knight of the University of California-San Diego, Jack A. Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Martin J. Blaser of New York University Langone Medical Center -- said it may be possible one day to prevent disease by reintroducing lost microbes. But that could happen only if researchers first collect beneficial microbes from remote Latin American and African populations that have the greatest microbiota diversity before they, too, experience the effects of urbanization. People living in urbanized societies have lost a substantial part of their microbiota diversity; the gut flora of most Americans, for example, is half as diverse as that of hunter-gatherers in isolated Amazonian villages.
An international effort, including significant funding, would be needed to collect and store the collected microbes in a global repository.
Since the early 20th century, diseases and disorders such as obesity, asthma, allergies and autism have increased dramatically, first across the industrialized world and more recently in developing countries. Scientific evidence increasingly points to disturbances to the microbiota during early life, and resulting metabolic abnormalities during development, as a key contributing factor. Treatment costs for obesity and diabetes have surpassed $1 trillion, leading the authors to compare worldwide microbial loss to climate change in terms of importance to humanity's future.
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Journal Reference:
Maria G. Dominguez Bello, Rob Knight, Jack A. Gilbert, Martin J. Blaser. Preserving microbial diversity. Science, 2018; 362 (6410): 33 DOI: 10.1126/science.aau8816