(AP) -- The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety
of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that's a good
thing. The first results of an international effort to catalog
the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170
different bacteria species thriving in the average person's
digestive tract. The study also found that people with
inflammatory bowel disease had fewer distinct species inside the
gut. The findings are being published in Thursday's issue of the
journal Nature. More than 99 percent of the different types of
genes in our bodies are not in fact human, but come from
microbes. So cataloging the genetics of bacteria inside of us
will improve vastly on the mapping of the human genome, study
co-author Jun Wang, a Chinese genomics researcher. Bacteria
"rule this planet, including our body," study co-author Jeroen
Raes, a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory
in Germany, said in an e-mail. "I think it's important that
people realize that we are not real