For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away.
But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body. No one knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria.
In a new five-year federal endeavour, the Human Microbiome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.
They discovered as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person’s. To the scientists’ surprise, they also found genetic signatures of diseasecausing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.
The work is “fantastic,” said Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton University microbiologist. Until recently, Bassler added, the bacteria in the microbiome were thought to be just “passive riders.”
They were barely studied, microbiologists explained, because it was hard to know much about them. They are so adapted to living on body surfaces and in body cavities, surrounded by other bacteria, that many could not be cultured and grown in the lab. It was only with the advent of relatively cheap and fast gene sequencing methods that investigators were able to ask what bacteria were present.
The microbiome starts to grow at birth, said Lita Proctor, programme director of the project. At birth cabies pick up bacteria from mother’s vagina
But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body. No one knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria.
In a new five-year federal endeavour, the Human Microbiome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.
They discovered as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person’s. To the scientists’ surprise, they also found genetic signatures of diseasecausing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.
The work is “fantastic,” said Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton University microbiologist. Until recently, Bassler added, the bacteria in the microbiome were thought to be just “passive riders.”
They were barely studied, microbiologists explained, because it was hard to know much about them. They are so adapted to living on body surfaces and in body cavities, surrounded by other bacteria, that many could not be cultured and grown in the lab. It was only with the advent of relatively cheap and fast gene sequencing methods that investigators were able to ask what bacteria were present.
The microbiome starts to grow at birth, said Lita Proctor, programme director of the project. At birth cabies pick up bacteria from mother’s vagina
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