RSS Feed
June 14th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda WEDNESDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) — For the first time,
researchers have been able to identify what is “normal” when it comes to
the microorganisms living in and on the human body.
According to 14 new studies being published in the June 14 issue of
Nature and several Public Library of Science journals, the
human “microbiome” consists of more than 10,000 microbial species and 8
million microbial genes, most of which co-exist happily with humans to
their mutual benefit.
“This is giving us a picture of what a healthy individual looks like,”
said Jeffrey Cirillo, a professor of microbial and molecular pathogenesis
at Texas AM Health Science Center College of Medicine in Bryan, who
was not involved with the study.
Scientists hope that knowing what “normal” looks like will one day help
scientists prevent and treat diseases.
Little has been known about the inhabitants of the various parts of the
human body because it’s difficult if not impossible to grow most of the
bacteria found there, Dr. Eric Green, director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute, said during a Wednesday news conference.
But the advent of new and cost-effective DNA sequencing techniques now
allows researchers to sample and identify microorganisms directly from the
human body.
This massive five-year project involved 240 healthy adult volunteers in
St. Louis and Houston.
Researchers took samples from 15 sites in men and 18 sites in women,
including the mouth, skin, nose, vagina and lower intestine.
The researchers counted more than 10,000 species of microbes in the
body and as many as 10 bacterial cells for every human cell.
In a 200-pound adult, that amounts to between two and six pounds of
bacteria, Green said.
The 8 million or so genes from these microbes (compare that to only
22,000 in the normal human genome) “play a critical role in our
development and health,” said Bruce Birren, director of the Genomic
Sequencing Center for Infectious Diseases and co-director of the Genome
Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Interestingly, bacteria in one part of the body are very different from
those in another, with the most diversity found on the skin.
Microbes also differed greatly from individual to individual,
suggesting that people might have their own unique “microbial signatures.”
Although the actual organisms might be different, the functions they
perform stay the same.
“They have the same core functions,” said Birren. “We don’t all have
the same bacteria, although they all seem to have been organized to do
similar things.”
Confirming previous suspicions, the researchers found that even healthy
people harbor certain levels of harmful bacteria.
The challenge now is to figure out how and why they become dangerous
and cause illness.
“This is really a new vista in biology,” said Dr. Phillip Tarr,
director of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “This opens up many, many new
opportunities to improve the health of our population.”
One paper in the series looked at how microbes in the intestine might
be linked to necrotizing enterocolitis, a gastrointestinal illness in
premature babies that can kill up to one-third of its victims.
“These bacteria are not passengers,” Tarr explained. “They are
metabolically active as a community and we now have to reckon with them
much as we have to reckon with an ecosystem in a forest or a body of
water. We’re moving out of old paradigm of one germ one disease one person
and more into the paradigm of how the microbial community affects both
health and disease.”
Cirillo added: “This is a huge study, the most comprehensive I’ve seen,
particularly in healthy individuals. It’s going to set a foundation for a
lot of future work.”
More information
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on human
microbiota.
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
