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This isn’t something a mother wants to hear: when you gave birth to your child, you laced it with millions of unseen forces that are shaping the way it thinks and behaves. Under their influence, your baby’s nerves will grow and connect in ways that will affect everything from how anxious to how coordinated it is. Thanks to your very first birthday present, your infant’s brain is being shaped by its gut. Or, more accurately, what’s inside its gut.
The bowels of every baby are filled with trillions of bacteria that outnumber the cells of our own body by ten to one. This “microbiome” acts like on of our own organs, harvesting energy from our food and blocking the growth of harmful bacteria. It’s also a gift from our mothers. In the womb, we’re largely sterile. It’s only when we pass through the vagina that we’re seeded with our first set of bacteria. This community of passengers changes as we grow up, shifting in membership as we move from milk to solid food.
But the bacterial passengers of HMS Baby don’t just react as their vehicle develops; they help to steer it too. By studying mice, Rochellys Diaz Heijtz from the Karolinska Institute has found that a mammal’s gut bacteria can affect the way its brain develops as it grows up. They could even influence how it behaves as an adult.
Heijtz worked with two strains of mice – one that was completely free of germs, and another that had an intact microbiome but no disease-causing bacteria. The two strains behaved differently. The germ-free mice were more active, and spent more time scurrying around their enclosures. They were also less anxious and more likely to take risks, such as spending long periods of time in bright light or open spaces.
Could it really be that gut bacteria were behind these differences? Heijtz proved as much by transplanting the microbiome of the disease-free mice into the bowels of the germ-free ones. Sure enough, when the inoculated babies grew up, they behaved in the “normal” cautious way, just like the disease-free ones. This only worked if Hejitz did the transplants on baby mice. If she gave sterile adults a shot of gut bacteria, their behaviour didn’t change.
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