![]() "Regardless of whether you're in a closed or open environment, there's always a constant exchange of microbes between a host and their environment, and that constant exposure has impacts on health for example it can lead to changes in a host's immune system that help the host stave off pathogens," said Argonne's Jack Gilbert, an author of the study and the director of The Microbiome Center, a joint Argonne, University of Chicago and Marine Biological Laboratory program. ![]() These findings are helping researchers better understand the relationship between captivity and microbial diversity and health, knowledge that could be key to improving the health of animals in the care of zookeepers, veterinarians and other caretakers. Statistical comparison revealed that, as with humans and pets in their homes, captive Komodo dragons transfer a significant source of bacteria and other microbes to their enclosures. They then compared these two sets of data to each other and to past studies of humans and pets. ![]() zoos as well as the environment of two of the 12 enclosures. Researchers noticed this pattern after sampling the microbial communities found in the saliva, skin and feces of 37 Komodo dragons across 12 U.S. Their findings, published in The American Society of Microbiology's mSystems journal, say that the pattern of microbial exchange is "likely circular in nature," meaning that captive dragons contribute microbes to their environment, and reacquire these same microbes from their environment, repeating this exchange in an ongoing cycle without other external sources of microbial diversity. ![]() ![]() Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory, are the first to identify similarities in the way in which Komodo dragons and humans and their pets share microbes within closed environments. Researchers at the University of California San Diego, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Chicago and the U.S. ![]()
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