The bacteria in your gut depend on where you are in the social network around you. The microbes within us treat our social networks as the extended environment in which they thrive. They can spread from person to person. New #HNL work out today in @natureportfolio.bsky.social . 1/ - ThreadSky

nachristakis.bsky.social • 95 days ago

The bacteria in your gut depend on where you are in the social network around you.

The microbes within us treat our social networks as the extended environment in which they thrive. They can spread from person to person.

New #HNL work out today in @natureportfolio.bsky.social . 1/

Comments

thinkling.bsky.social•82 days ago

This is being reported as a possible mechanism of disease transmission for conditions affected by the microbiome (e.g., depression). Presumably disease doesn’t depend on specific strains but more on species? Which would lead me to ask, what is the gap between shared species and shared strains?

suessmund.bsky.social•95 days ago

Interesting

avimitrani.bsky.social•79 days ago

📌

buzzdazjazz.bsky.social•93 days ago

Is the similar bacterial profile only a result of social networking or is it also a cause of similar behaviors, conditions, interpersonal compatibility and so on?

outseide.bsky.social•94 days ago

Fascinating!!

davidcolquhoun.bsky.social•79 days ago

I know that gut bacteria are fashionable at the moment (not least with the vast nutriquack industry), but this is surely a hoax.

kindracrick.com•94 days ago

We share multitudes with our friends. This is great! 🧪

saraidh.bsky.social•89 days ago

📌

monettc.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

"Gut Microbiome Strain-Sharing within Isolated Village Social Networks" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08222-1 with Francesco Beghini, Jackson Pullman, Marcus Alexander, Shivkumar Shridhar, Drew Prinster, Adarsh Singh, Rigoberto Juárez, Edoardo Airoldi, and Ilana L. Brito 2/

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

This work took >6 years of my life (with maddening delays due to COVID19), but it started as a kernel of an idea left over from our 2007 paper on the spread of obesity (https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMsa066082 ) in which we noted that social contagion and biological contagion could both occur. 3/

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

To discern the social metagenomics of the microbiome, we used a subset of villages in an ongoing longitudinal cohort of 24,702 people living in 176 isolated Honduras villages (who were in this RCT in @ScienceMagazine in 2024: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5147). 4/

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

Our team carted liquid nitrogen to 18 Honduras villages and persuaded 1,787 people to give us samples of their poop, which we subjected to shotgun metagenomic sequencing to discern species and strains of gut microbes. This was not easy in any way. 5/

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

Using both species-level and strain-level data, we show that microbial sharing occurs in many relationship types, notably including non-familial and non-household connections. 6/

nachristakis.bsky.social•95 days ago

We can actually predict who your friends are based on whether you have similar bacteria in your poop! And that metric outperforms other more usual social features, such as how you resemble your friends on a host of traits like age, sex, wealth, etc. 7/

bicyclethieves.bsky.social•94 days ago

How do they spread from person to person?

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply