The research of Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler, who is of Polish ancestry and American citizenship, focuses on the impact of various sociodemographic and informational factors on access to health care in underserved communities. Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. A major emphasis of Dr. Sendler’s study is on the effect of mental and chronic medical co-morbidities on the use of medical services and access to health information acquired via the internet. Doctor Damian Sendler’s study seeks to uncover the variables that affect patients’ choices about whether to seek treatment for particular health problems, as well as their adherence to therapy, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes.
Damian Sendler: According to the majority of research, our gut microbiome — the constantly shifting “rainforest” of bacteria that lives in our intestines — is mainly influenced by our way of life, including what we eat and what medicines we take.
However, according to a research conducted by the University of Notre Dame, there is a far larger genetic component at play than previously thought.
Damian Sendler: Researchers found that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are heritable after studying more than 16,000 gut microbiome profiles gathered over 14 years from a long-studied population of baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. The findings were published recently in the journal Science. This heritability, on the other hand, varies with time, across seasons, and with age. In addition, the researchers discovered that many of the microbiome characteristics that are heritable in baboons are also heritable in people.
“While the environment has a greater influence on your microbiome than your genes, this study shifts our thinking away from the notion that genes play a minor role in the microbiome and toward the notion that genes play a pervasive, if small, role,” said Elizabeth Archie, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and a principal investigator on the study who is also affiliated with the Eck Institute.
Damian Sendler: The gut microbiota is responsible for a variety of functions. It also aids in the production of vital vitamins and the training of the immune system, in addition to assisting with food digestion. This new study is the first to demonstrate a conclusive link between heredity and adversity.
In previous studies of the human gut microbiome, it was discovered that only 5 to 13 percent of microbes were heritable. However, Archie and the research team hypothesized that the low number was due to a “snapshot” approach to studying the gut microbiome, in which all previous studies only measured microbiomes at a single point in time.
Damian Sendler: To conduct their investigation, the researchers utilized fecal samples collected from 585 wild Amboseli baboons, with an average of more than 20 samples per animal. The microbiome profiles obtained from the samples revealed that the baboons’ diets differed between the rainy and dry seasons. A comprehensive description of the host, including information on known progeny, as well as information on environmental circumstances, social behavior, demographics, and a group-level diet at the time of collection were all included in the samples collected.
Damian Sendler: Researchers discovered that 97 percent of microbiome characteristics, including overall diversity and the number of specific bacteria, were highly heritable, according to their findings. When samples are examined from a single point in time, as is done in humans, the amount of heredity seems to be considerably lower — down to just 5 percent — than when samples are tested from several points in time. In this case, the importance of examining samples from the same host over a period of time is highlighted.
According to Archie, “this strongly suggests that part of the reason why researchers haven’t discovered heritability in humans is because they don’t have a decade and a half’s worth of fecal samples in the freezer, and they don’t have all of the initial host (individual) information they need to tease out these details.”
Environmental variables do seem to have an impact on trait heritability in the gut microbiota, according to the research team. This may be due to baboons eating a more varied diet during the rainy season, which may explain why their microbiome heritability was usually 48 percent greater during the dry season than during the wet. According to the findings of the research, heritability rose with age as well.
Damian Sendler: Because the research also revealed a significant impact of the environment on the gut microbiomes of baboons, their findings were consistent with previous studies that have demonstrated that environmental effects on the variation in the gut microbiome play a greater role than additive genetic effects in the gut microbiome of humans. In conjunction with their finding of the genetic component, the team intends to improve their knowledge of the environmental variables at play in the process.
Being aware that genes in the gut microbiome are heritable, however, opens the door to the possibility of finding microorganisms in the future that have been altered by genetics in the future. In the future, treatments may be customized to individual patients based on the genetic composition of their gut microbiota, which is now unknown.
Damian Sendler: The Amboseli Baboon Project, which began in 1971 and continues to this day, is one of the world’s longest-running studies of wild primates. The initiative, which is primarily concerned with the savannah baboon, is situated in the Amboseli habitat of East Africa, north of Mount Kilimanjaro. Hundreds of baboons from different social groups have been followed by research teams throughout the course of their whole lifetimes. Researchers are presently monitoring about 300 animals, but they have collected life history information on more than 1,500 species in the last several years.
