- [Cecil] There's a hypothesis out there that many of
these diseases, like eczema and allergies, and asthma
and even type two diabetes may be diseases of civilization.
And if it's true, we want to look at the ancestral state
of that microbiome, and find out what exactly did change
so we can get a better understanding of the biology.
And I realized what we need is a biodiversity project,
a human biodiversity project,
and I realized, well I could do that.
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- [Christina] Hi, welcome.
- [Cecil] Nice to see you.
- [Christina] Nice to meet you.
Well welcome, come on let's go on upstairs.
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- [Female] So Christina, what is the human microbiome?
- The human microbiome is a sum total of microorganisms
that live in and on the human body.
Collectively these weigh as much
as your brain or your liver.
- Yeah, and actually thinking about it as
an additional organ is really appropriate because
basically without the microbiome you'd be dead,
I mean you cannot survive without it.
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What we studied are two Peruvian populations.
One is in the Amazon Jungle, called an abscess population,
and another one was the Huánuco,
which was in the highlands, real high altitude plains.
And we compared that to some published data
that included populations over in Africa.
We find that the hunter/gatherers are actually
grouping together, even though they're a continent apart.
- So this is the really the cradle of humanity and
if you think in terms of migration, human migration,
we have crossed into Asia, then across the Bering Strait...
- Into the Northwest of North America,
coming all the way down to South America.
This is really the last great continental expansion
of our species.
And, these two communities are more similar
to one another than they are to an adjacent population
that's living more of an agricultural lifestyle.
So, I mean to me that was really extraordinary.
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- Do you know what kind of microbes these are?
- Well, one of the microbes that we know that are missing
is microbes that belong to the genus Treponema.
This group of Treponema are more known
for metabolizing fibrous foods, and what we're finding is
that this Treponema is present in every traditional
population that has been studied so far, but it is
all but absent in individuals living in
an urban industrialized environment.
- It's also found among all of the great apes,
it's even found in things like pigs and cattle and termites.
And yet, it's us living in
industrialized societies who lack it.
- We actually have seen them
also in archaeological feces, Coprolites.
We can say they do appear to be members of
the ancient gut from ancient people.
- We've talked about what you guys do,
we really wanna see how you do it.
- Absolutely, let's go up to the lab and I'll introduce you
to Andrew, who's been doing some of the lab work.
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- [Andrew] I was the person that had to collect
a lot of these samples from the Peruvian Amazon,
and they eventually made their way back here.
So they get extracted using this robot.
- How has that sped up your workflow?
- Yes, it's saving us a lot of time in the lab,
that's for sure, the whole process, from start to finish,
takes about 10 hours or so.
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- How has next generation sequencing helped your research?
- So next generation sequencing has really revolutionized
the field of Metagenomics.
In fact, what we call Metagenomics today
didn't really exist even eight years ago.
We aren't limited to just study bacteria, or just archeo,
or just eukaryotes, we get everything,
including the viruses, make it a holistic view
of the mycology that we've just never had before.
- So what would you say are some of the challenges?
- Laboratory methods have become embarrassingly easy,
and now the real challenge is analyzing
the sheer volume of data.
The tools that are being developed right now
are allowing us to do things we could never do before.
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- One of the things we need to recognize is we live
in a very different environment than those
traditional peoples that we're studying, so maybe
by studying them, we can learn a little bit about how
that biology works and develop interventions to reduce
those risks for autoimmune diseases.
We wanna make sure that that intervention not only applies
to affluent, you know Euro-Americans
in urban industrialized environments, we wanna
make sure that it applies to a diversity of peoples.
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- [Male] So how do you see the future of metagenomics?
- If you think about your eukaryotic cell,
it's literally built up from prokaryotic ancestors,
and I don't know what the future holds,
but it's extraordinary and very very exciting.
- Our goal is not to take us back into
some sort of golden paleolithic past, our goal is instead
to use this information to look towards the future.
We now have more than seven billion people on this planet,
we are facing a very complex and a future
full of challenges, we want to use this information
to improve human health.
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- It's just so mind-boggling to think that these tiny
little microbes, these invincible microbes are doing so much
to us, like disease, human health,
making sure we're feeling well today.
- Yeah, autoimmune disease,
type two diabetes, all of those...
- [Female] Allergies. - [Male] Allergies.
- Oh big one.
- [Male] Asthma. - [Female] Yeah.
- It's incredible the difference it can make.
- It is.
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