November, surprised even him. “When
people move to a new country, they
begin to lose their native microbes and
pick up the new country’s microbes
almost immediately,” he says. In fact,
“immigrants’ microbiomes changed
much faster than their diets.” Given
the metabolic role of the microbiome,
weight gain may be partially explained
by this transition.
Dominguez-Bello could not have
planned better validation of her case
for microbial vulnerability, let alone
the need for a vault. It’s entirely pos-
sible that even the Yanomami hunter-
gatherers she first studied just 10 years
ago no longer harbor as much microbial
diversity as her frozen samples. (The
health care workers who made contact
provided them with antibiotics.) No
microbiome is safe until it’s on ice.
Knights’ research also exposes
one of the problems with the cur-
rent fad of knowing your gut health.
Companies offer to sequence people’s
microbiomes for a couple of hundred
dollars and provide dietary advice to
cultivate certain species, ostensibly to
improve well-being. But that health
boost is inherently limited, since the
benchmark for microbial diversity
derives from the gut census of other
Westerners. These tests may be useful
for an individual to monitor the com-
position of their own microbiome over
time, but the labs may not even know
about many beneficial bugs.
“The Microbiota Vault is a must-
have,” says Knights. Like Dominguez-
Bello, he sees it as a sort of global
backup gut, available for withdrawals.
But Knights also envisions it becom-
ing a global microbial lending library.
“Donating microbes to the vault is a
gift to future generations,” he says. “It is
another way of passing on your genes.
Your human genes go to your own
children, but your microbiome genes
could one day find a home in millions
of humans.”^ D
Jonathon Keats is a contributing editor
at Discover.
JULY/AUGUST 2019. DISCOVER 93
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