Today our paper "Dynamics of the normal gut microbiota: A longitudinal one-year population study in Sweden", spearheaded by Lisa Olsson and Valentina Tremaroli, was published online in Cell Host & Microbe.

Compared to the developing child’s microbiome, an adult microbiome has for a long time been considered stable. Based on the collection of all bacteria in the microbiomes from the same adult years apart are more similar than another adult’s microbiome. But does that mean that individual bacteria do not change in our microbiome? In our latest published work, we show that different bacteria, with different properties, have different patterns of variation when the same individuals were sampled at multiple occasions.

Some bacteria have the same abundance all the time and some bacteria are sometimes high and sometimes low. We also saw that in those individuals with the largest differences between samples have lower levels of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, which is a bacterium we believe is important for a healthy microbiome.   

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