You are what you eat - at least when it comes to the microbiome. A catalog of microorganisms from more than 2,500 types of cheese, meat and other food suggests that a small part of the microbiome of every person comes from the food they eat. The study 1 is the largest directory of bacteria and other microbes in food.

Some microbes are an essential ingredient fermented food - from salami to sauerkraut and kimchi to kefir. Other microorganisms in fermented and non -fermented foods can be important for their taste and other properties such as their durability, says microbiologist Nicola Segata from the University of Trento in Italy, who led the work and published on August 29 in Cell

fermented foods

Segata and his colleagues sequential microbial DNA of almost 2,000 foods and consolidated this data with almost 600 existing food microbiomas. Most foods were fermented-Segata paid attention to samples from Gorgonzola cheese, one of his favorites-but the study also included fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables.

Similar foods tended to house similar microbes, although some interesting patterns became recognizable on closer inspection. Lactic acid producing bacteria including lactobacillus were particularly often represented in dairy products, but the composition varied. Dutch blue cheese housed other lactobacillus species as Italian Fontina and Mozzarella, for example. Microbes made of coffee, Kombucha and Pu’er - a fermented tea from Yunnan, China - resembled them in alcoholic beverages.

Almost every microbiome study discovered organisms that have never been seen before, and this was no exception. About half of the microbes identified by the researchers were new. Pulque - a acidic agave wine that is drunk in Mexico - was particularly rich in this microbial dark material, as was African palm wine and cheese broth.

microbe overlap

When the researchers compared the food microbiomas with thousands of microbiomes from human intestines and mouths, they found a certain overlap. About 3 % of the microbes in the intestine of adults, 8 % in children and more than 50 % in newborns were also found in food. This does not necessarily mean that these microbes come from the food that people have eaten, says Segata: the overlap could also indicate that in the past food microbes were established in the intestine of people and circulated between people. The food microbes in the microbiomes of newborn tends to be associated with dairy products were also found in breast milk.

None of these findings is particularly surprising, says Benjamin Wolfe, microbiologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. But the study laid the foundation for detailed studies why different microbes and microbe communities - are present in certain foods. He is also interested in all the unknown microbes in what we eat. According to Wolfe, this explore could lead to new types of food with new properties.