Scientists List Hundreds of Bacteria Inside the Human Gut
The human gut is a breeding ground – in a good way – for a wide variety of bacteria, according to a new study.
An international effort to catalog millions of non-human genes found inside people, found more than 170 different bacteria species living in the average person’s digestive system. The study also found that people with inflammatory bowel disease had fewer unique species than healthier people.
More than 99 percent of all the different gene types in the human body are not even human, but come from microbes. Scientists are hoping that cataloging the bacteria genes inside us will improve vastly on the mapping of the human genome, study co-author Jun Wang, a Chinese genomics researcher.
Study co-author Jeroen Raes, a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany, said in an e-mail to the Associated Press, “I think it’s important that people realize that we are not really human “” we are a walking colony of bacteria and they are crucial for our well being and health.”
Raes said medical studies usually ignore the influence of gut bacteria, but “this blueprint will allow us to study the role of the flora in many human diseases, such as Crohn’s, diabetes, obesity and so on.”
Researchers studied 124 adults and concluded that most people’s digestive systems have a lot in common. At least 57 species of bacteria were present in nearly everyone. In total, they were able to catalog one thousand different bacteria species.
The findings appear in today’s issue of the journal Nature.
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