🤝🏽 We are so grateful to every community member who partnered with us. We returned to all participant communities to thank donors in person & share results! Paper: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Press release: biologicalsciences.uchicago.…... Happy to answer questions!

🥛Some communities like the Spitians have eaten wheat & dairy for generations, but others only recently added them after urbanizing; we see this in their Bifidobacterium 🩺 Controlling for community, urban folks show lower diversity & more Megamonas, linked to obesity risk.

Some key takeaways: 🌏SAMBAR microbiomes are distinct globally, but there's no single "South Asian microbiome." Culturally-specific diets matter! 🫘The Pochury Naga eat Axone, a fermented soybean condiment, and we detect more Bacillus in their gut microbiomes than rest of SAMBAR

Urbanization & lifestyle transition affect gut microbiomes worldwide, but South Asia has been left out of the conversation. We worked w/ 10 diverse communities to see how microbiomes reflect local diets/dietary shifts. Our dataset: the South Asian MicroBiome ARRay, or SAMBAR🍛

Thrilled to share our lab's newest paper! A collaboration with @NirajRai3 and team, led by GenSCAPE postdoc Shreya Ramachandran and @NagarjunaPasup5, with our incredible team across India and Sri Lanka! 🧵below on what we found studying South Asian gut microbiomes: