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MICROBIOME

Lifelong sex-dependent trajectories of the human gut microbiota

Nature Aging volume 1, pages 22–23 (2021)Cite this article

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The human gut microbiota is comprised of a vast assortment of trillions of microbial cells belonging to hundreds of different species, differing substantially between individual hosts. A new study has systematically investigated the relationship of host age to gut microbes in a geographically restricted and ethnically homogeneous human cohort, revealing key differences across ages and sexes.

The human gut microbiome and how it varies with age and in health and disease has drawn increasing attention from the scientific and public communities alike. Recent advances in sequencing technology and metagenomic analyses applied to gut microbial communities have, for instance, led to the observation that certain gut microbes offer substantial benefits to their host, and can even show intergenerational transmission1. However, reports of associations between gut microbes and host factors, such as disease and health, have often been inconsistent across studies, pointing to unidentified issues of reproducibility. Genetics as well as differences in environments and lifestyles likely play a role in these inconsistencies. For example, a recent study showed that mice genetically predisposed to develop a neurodegenerative disorder were more or less likely to develop the disease when reared in different facilities, and that these differences were linked to their acquired microbiome2. The extremely diverse environments in which humans live is therefore likely to strongly confound microbiome analyses. This is further complicated by differing sampling designs between studies and by the fact that metadata, such as medicine use, lifestyles and diet, are often missing information, either because they are not available or simply because the number of samples is too low to efficiently account for them. Sex and age are also key factors in microbiome variation among numerous other environmental and physiological confounders3. A current challenge of the microbiome field is therefore to consider these multiple factors, or to paraphrase Dobzhansky’s famous words: “nothing in the microbiome makes sense, except in the light of interindividual differences.”

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Fig. 1: Changes in the composition of the human gut microbiota across the lifespan in men and women.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK

    Ezgi Özkurt & Falk Hildebrand

  2. Earlham Institute, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK

    Ezgi Özkurt & Falk Hildebrand

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  1. Ezgi Özkurt
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  2. Falk Hildebrand
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Correspondence to Ezgi Özkurt or Falk Hildebrand.

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Özkurt, E., Hildebrand, F. Lifelong sex-dependent trajectories of the human gut microbiota. Nat Aging 1, 22–23 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-020-00019-x

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