We're One-Tenth Human

[BURNING MAN]

Rest of the body is a swarm of foreign microbes

WASHINGTON -- Scientists are beginning a large-scale effort to identify and analyze the vast majority of cells in or on your body that aren't of human origin.

Only about 10 per cent of the trillions of cells that make up a person are truly human, researchers say. The other 90 per cent are bacteria, viruses and other microbes swarming in your gut and on your skin.

"We really are a superorganism," Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said in an email. "From the moment we are born until we die, we live in a symbiotic relationship with our microbes."

"At birth, babies emerge from a sterile environment into one that is laden with microbes," said Laurie Comstock, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "The infant's intestines then rapidly become home to one of the densest populations of bacteria on Earth."

Most of these microbes are harmless, researchers say. Many are necessary to life and health. A troublesome minority, however, can cause everything from teenage acne and obesity to autism and cancer.

The National Institutes of Health has launched a $115-million, five-year project to identify, analyze and catalog hundreds of microbial species resident in or on the human body.

Called the Human Microbiome Project, it's modelled after the Human Genome Project, which decoded most of the human genes in the 1990s. The first 35 microbiome research grants took effect this summer.

"The composition of the complex microbial communities inhabiting the human body has a tremendous influence on human health and disease," said Richard Gibbs, a leading human genome researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Gibbs received a grant to sequence the genes of 400 bacterial strains by 2011.

The goal of the microbiome project, which is international in scope, is to identify which microbes are harmful and to figure out ways to prevent or treat diseases they cause.

It's a bewildering task, because scientists estimate there are about 1,000 different species of microbes living in the human gut and about as many more separate species on human skin.

The microbes form tiny colonies of bacteria that settle in different areas of the body. Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in St. Louis, likened them to "ecosystems," similar to those that plants and animals form on islands on Earth.

The most popular site for human skin microbes, surprisingly, is the forearm, which is home to 44 different microbial species, according to a recent study by Julia Segre, a microbiologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. The most barren region is behind the ear, where only 15 species typically settle, she reported in the journal Science last May.

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[empirez]

I have always felt more like a virus that a human being I guess...

[kidflash2008]

The bacterias in our intestines is what digests our food. Most of the "alien" bacteria have some sort of function in our bodies.

The appendix is a breeding ground for such bacteria. If one gets dysentery, the appendix releases the bacteria that our intestines have lost.

[$$kneel-B4-me$$]

if all guys are thought to be pigs, and our bodies are made up of bacteria and viruses. Then, shouldn't my name be H1N1?? ssuuweee!! piggy! piggy!

[banannabell]

My mom swears I'm a lizard baby. Darn you V. It's a long story lol. I should get my tounge sergically split just to freak mom out.

[BURNING MAN]

Originally Posted by TESLATOM

Viruses are not cells.

Thanks for the tip, genius.