Stomach bacteria could show prehistoric migration patterns
Updated
A West Australian Nobel Laureate, Professor Barry Marshall is tracing the migration patterns of prehistoric humankind by tracking the evolution of stomach bacteria, it includes trying to work out when different groups of people moved around the Pacific region.
Presenter: David Weber
Speaker: Professor Barry Marshall, West Australian Nobel Laureate
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DAVID WEBER: Professor Barry Marshall says the bacteria named Helicobacter pylori split into two groups.
One form is found in people in New Guinea and Australia, the other is found in South Pacific Islanders.
Professor Marshall says bacteria was and is tribal.
BARRY MARSHALL: Whatever Helicobacter we have in our stomach and we probably caught it from someone else in our family and they caught it from maybe their mother or their family. And so the type that you have is an indicator of where you came from. For instance, if you came from India and you're living in Perth, you would carry an Indian strain and maybe your children would carry a strain from India.
Extrapolating along those lines, you can use the identification of these strains by their DNA to indicate where your origins are.
DAVID WEBER: Will it be able to tell us something different about the way that humans spread around the world, or will it be able to allow us to make more precise calculations as to when people moved around the world?
BARRY MARSHALL: Well some people think it could be more precise because the human DNA studies are based on mitochondrial DNA, which you inherit from your mother. And there are only 37 genes in the mitochondria. Whereas if you study the Helicobacter there's more than 1,000 genes in Helicobacter so you should be able to get much more accurate timing ultimately.
DAVID WEBER: The work that's been done by Professor Marshall and his colleague Doctor Helen Windsor supplements research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.
The results came about by accident.
Professor Marshall says they were investigating why Aboriginal people didn't have the problems with stomach ulcers that the white population did.
BARRY MARSHALL: We thought maybe they didn't have those bacteria in the stomach and so we were proved wrong because when we did do the surveys we found that the bacteria is also quite common in Aboriginal people. So then we were then scratching our heads and thinking "Well why is that? Is the bacteria different, or are the people different?"
And both things are true in fact. Most Aboriginal people had European strains of Helicobacter but about a quarter of them had these slightly different strains and when we showed them to the experts at Max Planck who had this computer program to analyse it, they said "Hey, they look very much like some of the strains that we have been getting from the highlands of New Guinea."
