(Credit: Andrey_Popov/shutterstock) Trillions of bacteria call the human gut home. The bugs affect not only our digestion but our hormones and immune systems, too. Now researchers show most of the microbes that colonize mammals’ guts pass down from generation to generation. The few that don’t tend to be the kind that makes us sick. The discovery suggests pathogens evolved to spread between individuals instead of through inheritance.
Andrew Moeller, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the new research, wondered whether gut microbes that cause disease are specially tuned to spread between unrelated individuals through social interactions or shared environments. To find out, Moeller and his team captured two populations of wild mice. One came from the hot deserts of Tucson, Arizona. The other came from the northern climes of Edmonton, Alberta in Canada. Both populations lived in the same room in the upstate New ...
