The PEARL-AGE Study. Multigenerational Gut Bacteria Transmission and Its Stability in Families.

Overview

Investigators will recruit up to 4-generations of human family cohorts, in order to characterize the microbiome and its changes across different generations.

Interest in the gut microbiome from both the scientific community and public has increased exponentially over the last decade. Yet our knowledge of the microbes in the gut microbiome, their persistence and dispersal to new human hosts is still surprisingly ill-defined. Investigators hypothesize that some gut microbes persist over multiple generations and are adapted to varying degrees to their human hosts and families, making them potentially important members of the human gut. Bacterial strains can persist in the human host for years, with maternally-transferred strains known to persist longer in infants than environmentally acquired ones. It is conceivable that a given strain can colonize a host for several vertical generations, as already shown for Bifidobacterium using cultured isolates. Yet investigators currently lack knowledge of microbial persistence over multiple generations, and the proposed PEARL-AGE cohort is the first study investigating multi-generation persistence of gut bacteria (to our best knowledge). The PEARL-AGE project will investigate microbial transfer and the evolution of microbes in family members from different generations. Investigators will recruit siblings, fathers/guardians, grandparents, and great-grandparents to fully capture vertical (between generations) and horizontal (same generation) microbial transmission across multiple generations, as well as tracking parallel microbial evolution in multiple family members. This will substantially increase our understanding of microbial transmission, long-term microbial persistence through generations and between cohabiting family members and siblings.

Conditions

Eligibility

Locations (1)

Outcomes