Uniform bacterial genetic diversity along the guts of mice inoculated with human stool

Environmental gradients exist throughout the digestive tract, driving spatial variation in the membership and abundance of bacterial species along the gut. However, less is known about the distribution of genetic diversity within bacterial species along the gut. Understanding this distribution is important because bacterial genetic variants confer traits important for the functioning of the microbiome and are also known to impart phenotypes to the hosts, including local inflammation along the gut and the ability to digest food. Thus, to be able to understand how the microbiome functions at a mechanistic level, it is essential to understand how genetic diversity is organized along the gut and the ecological and evolutionary processes that give rise to this organization. In this study, we analyzed bacterial genetic diversity of approximately 30 common gut commensals in five regions along the gut lumen in germ-free mice colonized with the same healthy human stool sample. While species membership and abundances varied considerably along the gut, genetic diversity within species was substantially more uniform. Driving this uniformity were similar strain frequencies along the gut, implying that multiple, genetically divergent strains of the same species can coexist within a host without spatially segregating. Additionally, the approximately 60 unique evolutionary adaptations arising within mice tended to sweep throughout the gut, showing little specificity for particular gut regions. Together, our findings show that genetic diversity may be more uniform along the gut than species diversity, which implies that species presence-absence may play a larger role than genetic variation in responding to varied environments along the gut.