Yanomami tribe
IN PHOTO: A Yanomami Indian dances at the community of Irotatheri, during a government trip for journalists, in the southern Amazonas state of Venezuela, just 19km (12 miles) from Brazil's border, September 7, 2012. The Venezuela government and indigenous groups are disputing whether an alleged massacre of Amazon villagers took place after the government said it found no evidence of an attack. A group representing the Yanomami tribe last week said that Brazilian gold miners had crossed the border and attacked a village from a helicopter. Venezuelan officials said over the weekend that flyovers of the area led them to believe that the allegations were false. Picture taken September 7, 2012. Reuters/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

Scientists have discovered that gut bacteria composition of an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomami, has evolved into antibiotic-resistant genes, despite the fact that these people have never been exposed to antibiotics before. The findings from a team of scientists from United States and Venezuela suggest bacteria have long evolved to gain the capability of fighting antibiotics, adding evidence that the battle against drug-resistant bacteria may be a hard one.

In 2008, Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist from New York University School of Medicine and one of the study authors, requested permission to investigate the people from the tribe. In 2009, Yanomami health care workers went on a remote medical expedition and collected skin and mouth DNA, and faecal specimen from 34 of the 54 Yanomami.

Dominguez-Bello and colleagues then sequenced the gut bacteria from the tribe and compared them to the samples from industrialised people. What they have found is that surprisingly, the Yanomami have significantly diverse gut bacteria composition compared to other populations.

In the study published in Science Advances on April 17, the report also states that despite the findings that these Yanomami also harbour high levels of parasites, they were healthy and did not suffer from common medical conditions such as , autoimmune disorders and high blood pressure.

In the same report, Gautam Dantas, a microbiologist from Washington University in St. Louis, studied the samples to detect presence of antibiotic-resistant genes and found that Yanomami had gut bacteria that could fight off antibiotics. Anthropologist Christina Warinner from University of Oklahoma in Norman described the resistance to antibiotic as “ancient and diverse” and is surprisingly widespread.

“Such findings and their implications explain why antibiotic resistance was so quick to develop after the introduction of therapeutic antibiotics…,” Warinner, who was not a co-author, said.

Scientists still do not know all the factors that influence an individual’s microbiome. However, Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said that food, chemicals and environment are major contributing factors. The researchers have kept the microbial samples they have collected to do further studies, according to Nature.

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