Publication in Nature Communication
The carcinogenic bacterium Helicobacter pylori has accompanied humans for about 100,000 years. The bacterium’s genes reflect the history of this millennia-long association and also allow conclusions to be drawn about human migration movements (Falush, …, Achtman & Suerbaum, Science 2003). The LMU microbiologist Prof. Sebastian Suerbaum, in collaboration with an international consortium of scientists, including from the Institut Pasteur in Shanghai and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, has now been able to show with the help of new analytical methods that the Helicobacter pylori bacteria resident in Europe today are the result of several migratory movements from Africa. The exchange between the genomes of bacteria formerly resident in Europe with bacteria that African immigrants brought with them in their stomachs has made important contributions to the evolution of H. pylori and made it possible to optimise the bacterial genomes by selection. In contrast, H. pylori genomes in Asia have significantly fewer traces of African H. pylori.
The results, published in the renowned journal Nature Communications, provide a fascinating insight into the role of human migration in the evolution of this important pathogen.
Original publication: Repeated out-of-Africa expansions of Helicobacter pylori driven by replacement of deleterious mutations. Harry Thorpe#, Elise Tourrette#, Koji Yahara#, …, Sebastian Suerbaum*, Kaisa Thorell*, Daniel Falush*.
# co-first authors; * co-last authors.
Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-34475-3