Surprisingly all men and women are only 10% human but 90% microbial - What is your view on the Human Microbiome Project?
Total microbial cells found in association with humans may exceed the total number of cells making up the human body by a factor of at least nine-to-one. The total number of genes associated with the human microbiome could exceed the total number of human genes by a factor of 100-to-one. Many of these organisms have not been successfully cultured, identified, or otherwise characterized. Organisms expected to be found in the human microbiome, however, may generally be categorized as bacteria (the majority), members of domain Archaea, yeasts, and single-celled eukaryotes as well as various helminth parasites and viruses, the latter including viruses that infect the cellular microbiome organisms, for example bacteriophages, the viruses of bacteria.
Some scientists think that the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) will address some of the most inspiring, vexing and fundamental scientific questions today. Importantly, it also has the potential to break down the artificial barriers between medical microbiology and environmental microbiology. It is hoped that the HMP will not only identify new ways to determine health and predisposition to diseases but also define the parameters needed to design, implement and monitor strategies for intentionally manipulating the human microbiota, to optimize its performance in the context of an individual’s physiology.
Your thoughts about this?
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I don’t fully get the 10–90 % reference, but I do know that we will die or badly function without the micro-organisms.
It’s a little bit what I’ve asked myself. Is the human body to be considered as one organism or a synchronized collective?
We have 1.5 kg of some 500 different bacteria in the intestines. More in the lungs, vagina, eyes, and the skin. Fungus as a part of the skin.
There are many things we don’t understand about the body. Actually, there is not much we do. It’s quite recent we realized that the appendix actually has a function, and it’s bacterial.
I see the likelihood and benefits of treatment of and with microbiota in medicine. The russians already do it succesfully since quite some time.
The possibilities of using bacteria and virus as a cure is to promising to ignore. It’s quite possible and likely that we will be treating cancer with engineered viruses in the future.
The amount of cells in the human body that are microbial are roughly to 91% (10 – 1).
Ah, yeah, I wasn’t really thinking there.
I’ll google more about this, but it would be spiffy if you included a source sometime Matt.
It makes me think about another question on here about how we might just be microbes in the universal gut.
@AstroChuck – You are correct of course. I tried to keep the question a bit simpler using roughly 90% and referring to this as “at least nine-to-one”. But in the definition I was using, see link above, it was indeed 91%.
Consider that not only are we “hosts” to all these other life forms, but 3–8% of the human genome itself consists of genetic material inserted by retroviruses over the course of our evolution. We carry, in effect fossilized viruses in our very code.
This is one of the least studied parts of human (and really, organismal) biology. Of course microbiology is extremely hard to study as we’ve been unable to culture so many bacterial species. I guess they’re trying to get around this with all the whole-genome sequencing (although characterizing a species in culture gives you information you can’t get from a sequenced genome!). Hopefully they’ll come up with some new culturing techniques to get around this.
In terms of the specifics of the project, I’m glad they’re going to try to characterize the normal, healthy human microbiome, but I have to wonder whether the NIH is going to get a diversity of samples or focus only on the united states. It probably depends of which labs get the grants to actually do the characterization or whether the NIH is doing it themselves. I would highly doubt whether the “typical” North American microbiome is the same as the “typical” African, Asian or European microbiome. I know there’s also an international project going on right now with the same goals of characterizing the human microbiome, so hopefully that will be covered by someone! It would be really really interesting to study the evolution of the human microbiome, and to look at how much of it is received from the environment and how much of it is inherited from your mother in utero/during childbirth.
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