Human gut home to millions of beneficial bacteria
outsourcing is a gut feeling, literally. A team of biologists has found that a sizeable amount of critical functions that keep humans ticking are performed by millions of beneficial bacteria that exist in the human gut, or colon.
Scientists led by Steven Gill of the Institute of Genomic Research in Maryland, usa, who looked at microbial diversity in the gastric intestine, were baffled to see that it harbours up to 100 trillion (one trillion equals 1,000 billion) microbes, representing more than 1,000 species. This motley "microbiome' contains more than 60,000 genes