The Remarkable Microbiome of Tanzania's Hadza Hunter-Gatherers.
A genomic study led by researchers at Stanford University has performed ultra-deep metagenomic sequencing on 351 fecal samples from the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Over half of the 8.4 million protein families found in Hadza gut microbes are absent from the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Protein database. Bacterial and viral species found in the microbiomes increase the global catalog of known microbiota by around 24%. The study highlights the striking level of genomic novelty found in the Hadza hunter-gatherer microbiome, which has extremely high microbiome diversity compared to Western industrialized populations.