Description of the living environments and how they were set up with what they will contain. Figure taken from Zhou et al. 2016.
Everyone knows that different
environments will have a different microbial community. Who knew that it could
even affect the microbes in our guts as well. This study uses a common model
organism we all know as mice to be observed under three environments under different
conditions. The first being a pathogen-free environment, the second being a
household environment and the third being a farm environment. Any other
variable was controlled for all three groups in the study. By using a
high-throughput sequence of the 16S rRNA gene, it was found that all three
groups had their own specific community of gut microbes. It was concluded that
the different exposures in their environments would enhance diversity in the
microbial community and increase born resistance of mice to pathogens. This is
important because mice are model organisms for us humans and this will help
understand how different environments affect even our gut microbial community.
Zhou, D., Zhang,
H., Bai, Z., Zhang, A., Bai, F., Luo, X., Hou, Y., Ding, X., Sun, B., Sun, X.,
Ma, N., Wang, C., Dai, X. and Lu, Z. (2016), Exposure to soil, house dust and
decaying plants increases gut microbial diversity and decreases serum
immunoglobulin E levels in BALB/c mice. Environ Microbiol, 18: 1326–1337.
doi:10.1111/1462-2920.12895
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