Scientists recently studied how different factors like age, sex, smoking, and body weight influence the way bacteria in our gut interact with each other. Published in Communications Biology, their work looked beyond just the presence or amount of individual bacteria and focused on how these bacteria coexist and support each other, called co-abundance.
The gut has many kinds of bacteria that form communities by working together or sharing resources. These bacterial groups can reveal hidden connections that simple counts of bacteria might miss. But studying these relationships in large groups of people has been challenging because previous methods had limits.
Using a newly developed statistical tool called MANOCCA, the researchers analyzed data from 938 healthy adults in France to see how environmental and personal factors impact bacterial co-abundance at different levels, like species, genus, and family. Unlike older methods, MANOCCA can handle both categorical and continuous variables while adjusting for other factors like age and sex.
The study found that age, sex, smoking habits, and BMI were strongly linked to changes in these bacterial interaction networks. For example, a core set of about 200 bacteria were affected by all these factors. Certain bacterial families, like Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococcaceae, showed significant shifts, especially in people with different BMI values or smoking behavior. Most of these bacterial interactions occurred between different families rather than within one family.
Compared to traditional methods that look only at individual bacteria amounts, MANOCCA was better at detecting complex interactions and provided more accurate predictions about a person’s age, sex, smoking status, and weight based on their gut bacteria.
This new approach helps scientists better understand the hidden teamwork among gut microbes and how our lifestyle shapes these networks. It opens doors for personalized health insights and future disease prevention by considering not just which bacteria we have but how they cooperate within our guts.
REFERENCE: Boetto C, Romero VB, Henches L, et al. (2025). The influence of environment on bacterial co-abundance in the gut microbiomes of healthy human individuals. Communications Biology, 8(1), 1537. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-025-08895-y, https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08895-y
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