Study suggests gut bacteria helped shape mammalian evolution

September 27th, 2019

The call to evolve could be coming from inside the house mouse.

Recent research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and University of California, Berkeley suggests that bacteria residing in the digestive tracts of mouse species have partly directed their evolution and divergence over the past few million years.

The study included four species of mice: Mus musculus domesticus, commonly known as the house mouse, and three other species from the same genus. The guts of each mouse species contained between 1,200 and 1,400 species of bacteria, some of which differed among the mouse species, as expected.

When the team examined the genetic makeup of bacterial species common to all four mouse species, it found that those bacteria began genetically branching apart around the same time as their respective mouse species — implying that the bacterial and mouse species evolved in tandem.

But the researchers suspected they could demonstrate a stronger, even causal, link between the evolution of gut bacteria and mice. To manage it, Amanda Ramer-Tait and her Nebraska colleagues first had to rear germ-free M. domesticus pups in a facility, among just a few of its kind in the United States, that could prevent bacteria from colonizing the rodents’ guts at birth.

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Story by Scott Schrage | University Communication