Overview
- The peer‑reviewed paper, published Thursday in Cell, releases an open dataset that researchers can use to test and build on the results.
- Researchers profiled 322 healthy adults of European, East Asian, and South Asian ancestry living in Asia, Europe, and North America using deep multiomics, a broad readout of lipids, proteins, metabolites, and gut microbes.
- The design separated genetic ancestry from environment, with South Asian participants showing higher signs of past pathogen exposure and Europeans showing richer gut microbial diversity and higher levels of metabolites tied to heart disease risk.
- Living outside one’s ancestral continent tracked with shifts in metabolic and lipid pathways, including cholesterol, bile acid, and arachidonic acid networks, along with selective changes in the gut microbiome.
- The team reports geography‑linked differences in molecular biological age and a new link between a telomerase gene, the gut microbe Oscillospiraceae UCG‑002, and the lipid sphingomyelin, while noting these leads need further validation before clinical use.