Researchers from Vall d'Hebron Institute for Research (VHIR) have contributed to the discovery of the existence of three groups of bacterial populations that divide world's population into three types of intestinal flora (the human microbiome), similar to what happens to blood groups.

This global classification allows researchers to define, in their search, the number of variables that may be implicated in disease, moving closer correlation between the state of the intestinal flora and the health of the individual.

The results of this phase of the study, which is a significant step of the European project MetaHIT, has just been published in the journal Nature.

The researchers expected to find differences in the microbiome as race, nationality, type of diet or environment. In contrast, surprisingly, these results have been grouped to humans, irrespective of their origin, into three groups according to the dominant bacteria, that will determine what other species will live with it and, therefore, what other species will form an individual's microbiome.