The gut microbiome has a circadian rhythm. Here's how it might affect your health.

The gut microbiome, a lively community of microbes that resides in the digestive tract, seems to run on a 24-hour clock. That may be really important for our Health — but scientists are just beginning to learn why. Early research hints that the bugs play a part in myriad bodily functions, from regulating sleep to breaking down drugs. 

Evidence suggests that, in adults, the abundance of certain microbes in the gut fluctuates daily. In other words, this flux follows a circadian rhythm, similar to the bodily processes that dictate when we sleep and wake up. 

Recently, a study revealed that bacteria living in the guts of babies as young as 2 weeks old also have a circadian rhythm. The report, published in April in the journal Cell Host and Microbe, showed that this rhythmicity increases with age. 

The researchers found that the microbes maintain these day-night rhythms even when they're extracted from the body and grown in the lab, suggesting that their rhythm is intrinsically regulated and thus not dictated solely by factors in the gut itself. 

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It's unknown why gut microbes behave this way, but their cyclical behavior may somehow help them colonize the human intestine, the study authors theorize. 

"Everything in biology has a reason," which often relates to whether a given trait would help an organism survive, Dirk Haller, co-senior study author and a professor of nutrition and immunology at the Technical University of Munich, told Live Science. In regard to the gut microbiome, the microbial community has evolved alongside the human body, becoming a core feature of our physiology.