The internationalization of human microbiome research

Abstract

The human microbiome has now been linked with myriad diseases, yet most of this research has been conducted on American and European populations that make up only 1/6th of the world's population. With growing recognition that human microbiomes differ tremendously across global populations, it is especially important to understand how these compositional differences impact health outcomes. Recent advances in infectious disease and malnutrition research have demonstrated the potential for microbiome-based strategies to address the biggest challenges in global health. This review highlights major advances toward understanding microbiome diversity across the world and its contributions to disease, and outlines key questions, challenges, and opportunities to broaden the scope of and promote inclusivity within microbiome research.

Figure 1

Global indicators of factors found to associate with microbiome composition in at least one population. (a) Urbanization data obtained from the United Nations Population Division [21]. (b) Cesarean section usage compiled by Boerma et al. [22]. (c) Prevalence of obesity in women over 20 years old reported by the Global Burden of Disease Consortium [23]. (d) Antibiotic consumption reported by the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy [24]. All data were obtained directly from the sources and plotted using the ‘rworldmap’ package in R. Data were not available for the countries colored in white.