Microbial communities in the gut and mouth have been followed every day for an entire year. Stool and saliva samples collected from two men show that the communities remain fairly stable, but can be rapidly and broadly disrupted by events such as a bout of food poisoning or a holiday to a different continent.
Eric Alm, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues analysed these samples as well as health and lifestyle variables such as fitness, diet, exercise and mood recorded by the two volunteers.
One of the men developed food poisoning, which wiped out most of his gut bacteria; the microbes were eventually replaced with genetically similar species. And some lifestyle changes perturbed specific organisms — increasing dietary fibre, for instance, affected the abundance of 15% of the microbes in the gut.
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A year with your microbes. Nature 512, 9 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/512009d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/512009d
