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An explosion of evidence in the past 5 years links the microbial composition of the gut to obesity in humans. Obesity also is influenced by many human genes, and the gut microbiome clearly is influenced by the environment. A multicenter team asked whether human genes might influence composition of the gut microbiome.
The team obtained more than 1000 fecal samples from monozygotic twin pairs, dizygotic twin pairs, and unrelated individuals. They determined the presence and amount of more than 9600 bacterial groupings. The microbiota of monozygotic twins were much more similar than the microbiota of dizygotic twins or unrelated people. For some bacterial groups, such as Bacteroidetes, the environmental influences were much greater than the inf…