Remote Tribal Village in Venezuela Have The Most Diverse Colonies of Bacteria in Human Body

Scientists have discovered that members of a village living remotely in a part of the Venezuelan Amazon have the most diverse colonies of bacteria ever reported living in and on the human body.

The findings from a team of scientists from United States and Venezuela suggest bacteria have long evolved to gain the capability of fighting antibiotics, adding evidence that the battle against drug-resistant bacteria may be a hard one.

According to the report, their microbiomes include bacteria that have genes that could make them resistant to treatment with antibiotics. Some of these genes could even make these bacteria resistant to synthetic drugs - an alarming discovery, given that these villagers had never had contact with either people of industrialized societies or commercial antibiotics prior to the study, the researchers said.

"This is one more piece of clear evidence that antibiotic resistance is a natural feature of the human microbiota, just waiting to be activated and amplified after antibiotic use," study researcher Gautam Dantas, an associate professor of pathology and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said during a news conference Wednesday (April 15).

The study, published April 17 in Science Advances, reports that the microbial populations on the skin and in the mouths and intestines of the Yanomami tribespeople were much more diverse than those found in people from the United States and Europe. The multicenter research was conducted by scientists at New York University School of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research and other institutions.

"This was an ideal opportunity to study how the connections between microbes and humans evolve when free of modern society's influences," said Dantas. "Such influences include international travel and exposure to antibiotics."