In Oregon, scientists at Oregon State University proposed an Anna Karenina principle for microbiomes that effectively shows the bacterial communities that live inside everyone are quite similar and stable when times are good, but when stress enters the equation, those communities can react very differently from person to person.
“When microbiologists have looked at how microbiomes change when their hosts are stressed from any number of factors – temperature, smoking, diabetes, for example – they’ve tended to assume directional and predictive changes in the community,” said Rebecca Vega Thurber, corresponding author on the study. “After tracking many datasets of our own we never seemed to find this pattern but rather a distinct one where microbiomes actually change in a stochastic, or random, way.”
The principle gets its name from the opening line of the Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”