Adaptation to dietary regimes: human and microbial perspective

Laure Ségurel
CNRS, Musée de l’Homme, Paris, France lsegurel@mnhn.fr
(exposé en français)

ATTENTION: En raison des mesures de restriction d’accès au Campus Triolet, les personnes extérieures à l’Université de Montpellier doivent venir munies de: AFFICHE IMPRIMÉE + UNE PIECE D'IDENTITÉ.

Human populations, originally all hunter-gatherers, have started to diversify their dietary regimes at the Neolithic revolution, about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of plant and animal domestication. This important cultural transition led to new selective pressures, which have left detectable signatures in the human genome. But humans are not the only ones that have been challenged by this dietary shift: our gut microbiome, the sum of all organisms inhabiting our digestive tract, have also likely adapted to these new foods. Here, I will first present results from my PhD where we investigated the selective pressures acting on variants associated with type 2 diabetes (likely involved in carbohydrates digestion) as well as on the lactase gene (involved in milk digestion) in herder versus farmer populations in Central Asia, for which we also have phenotypic data. Then, I will present results from a recent study I conducted in Central Africa where we contrasted the gut microbiome of hunter-gatherers, farmers and fishers in order to explore the role of diet but also of parasitism in shaping the community and diversity of our gut bacteria.

Related publications:

- Morton et al. (in press) Variation in rural African gut microbiota is strongly correlated with colonization by Entamoeba and subsistence. PLoS Genetics.

- Ségurel et al. (2013) Positive selection of protective variants for type 2 diabetes from the Neolithic onward : a case study in Central Asia. Eur J Hum Genet. 21(10):1146-51