Microbiota — Community types

The human gut microbiota is different in all the humans being worldwide, so your microbiota is like your personal fingerprint. However, there are many similarities between different microbiota, and this information can be used by us to develop health biomarkers and to define therapeutic strategies.

The human gut consists in trillions of microbes and the whole ecosystem varies between individuals in diversity, distribution and abundance. In any ecosystem the selective pressures, disturbances and survival conditions are very important in defining the species leading to a distinct community type in that area. There was a study on human microbiome investigating the impact of possible steering factors such as the dietary habits. The observation underlines that certain combination of microbes, distribution and diversity can lead to a distinct community structure. But, even more important, the people can be grouped in 3 main groups, in a similar way to the blood group type. They can have a high number of Bacteroides, Prevotella or Ruminococcus. People eating a diet with less fibre and high in animal fat tend to have the Bacteroides community, people with a diet high in fibre and low in animal fat tend to have Prevotella community type and finally, was shown that every individual will have a gradient from high to low abundances on these three groups of bacteria. You can see that different dietary habits can support different microbes, and changes to diet can shift the percentage of each community type.