Gut microbial dataset of a foraging tribe from rural West Bengal - insights into unadulterated and transitional microbial abundance

Abstract

The human gut microbiome contributes to a broad range of biochemical and metabolic functions that directly or indirectly affect human system. Numerous factors such as age, geographical location, genetic makeup, and individual health status significantly influence the diversity, stability, and relative abundance of the gut microbiome. Of the mentioned factors, geographical location and dietary practices appears to explain a significant portion of microbiome variation. On the other hand tribal people living in geographically isolated areas and dependent on their traditional food sources are considered as having relatively unadulterated gut as their guts are least colonized by Western diet. The Western diet — low in fiber and high in refined sugars — is basically wiping out species of bacteria from our intestines. That's the conclusion Smits (2017) and his team reached after analyzing the Hadza microbiome at one stage of their year long study. The trend was clear: The further away people's diets are from a Western diet, the greater the variety of microbes they tend to have in their guts. And that includes bacteria that are missing from American guts."So whether it's people in Africa, Papua New Guinea or South America, communities that live a traditional lifestyle have common gut microbes — ones that we all lack in the industrialized world. In this work we present a pilot study data of the gut microbiome of an ethnic tribe of West Bengal, India, originating from Dravidian descent - the Savars. These are nomadic tribes and are still dependent on hunting and gathering for their livelihood. We identified a healthy family and have analysed their stool samples for gut microbial profiles.

The association between somatotype and nutritional status: a cross-sectional study among the adult Sabar males of Purulia, West Bengal, India

“…Studies have shown that diet widely influences the gut microbiome and partially impacted human ability to extract and store calories as fat from food (Turnbaugh et al 2006;Menni et al 2017). In this context, a recent study of present authors on the gut microbial dataset of Savar tribal community of West Bengal showed that Savar gut microbial profile represents an abundance of unadulterated microbes constituted by Ruminococcaceae (15%), Succinovibrio (12%) and Bacteroides (31%) (Ganguli et al 2019). Another study conducted by Menni et al (2017) showed the possibility that Ruminococcus may be functionally linked to the lean phenotype, whereas, Gao et al (2018) in his study indicated a significant association between bacterial communities and underweight; therefore, the gut microbial composition may play a role in the regulation of human body composition as well as body weight.…”

A review on human gut microbial diversity in 21 tribal populations from India

“…The North-East Indian tribes, including Sikkim, were found to have similar food habits, though they belongs to different geo-political boundaries and shared ethnic affiliation. Sample sizes in the studies were different ranging from 193 [14] to merely 3 [16, 17].…”

“…India has become a melting pot where the different lifestyle factors and food choices are being infiltrated in many indigenous and traditional lifestyles even in tribal communities [14] with the alteration of the gut microbiome profile [16, 18]. Although some communities still remained isolated so there are some chances to study gut bacterial diversity in these isolated tribal populations to compare the future changes in gut bacterial diversity due to food and life styles factors.…”

“…Dehingia et al (2015) [14] claimed that geographical locations, culture and diet had significant influence on gut bacterial profile of the Indian tribes which were dominated by the genus Prevotella . The Drukpa Bhutia tribe in north of West Bengal followed traditional agriculture based diet along with some foraging and livestock rearing products [17] and the Savar tribe in south of West Bengal led a relatively more foraging lifestyle [16], but both of them retained their ancestral gut microbiome profile since they were not impacted much by external influences such as present-day life style factors and food. These two studies, on Drukpa Bhutia and Savar, also claimed parental contribution to the composition of the child’s gut microbiota.…”

“…Those studies seem to be preliminary reports since none of them mentioned the sample size required for this type of study with sufficient power. In case of the studies on the Savar [16] and Drukpa Bhutia [17], from West Bengal, the sample sizes were very low (n = 3) and constituted a single nuclear family unit (mother, father and a child). These two papers aimed at visualizing the diversity of bacterial phyla and genera in the guts of these families and discussing the passage of the bacterial genera/taxa from parents to child in the same family.…”