People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.

That's the view of scientists at Imperial College London who published a paper in Nature Biotechnology Oct. 6 describing how these microbes interact with the body. Understanding the workings of the superorganism, they say, is crucial to the development of personalized medicine and health care in the future because individuals can have very different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial fauna.

The scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Luckily for us, the bacteria are on the whole commensal, sharing our food but doing no real harm. (The word derives from the Latin meaning to share a table for dinner.) In fact, they are often beneficial: Our commensal bacteria protect us from potentially dangerous infections. They do this through close interaction with our immune systems.

read more digg story

My Comment:

I think the concept of the human body being outnumbered by bacteria is an important one to be aware of. There are more that 100 trillion bacterial cells in our body - most of them are in our gut. The bacteria outnumbers human / somatic cells by a factor of about 10 to 1. These bacteria and our overall gut health provide us with about 80% of our immunity. Something to think about when you eat a lot sugar (food for the bad bacteria in the gut) or take antibiotics (kills good and bad bacteria). Take care of your friendly flora in your gut, and they will take care of you.