Shots - Health Blog Fri October 12, 2012 Where You Live May
Determine What Lives Inside Your Mouth Lately, we've been
learning more and more about the teeming masses of bacteria
inside our bodies - essentially trillions of tiny organisms that
make us sick and keep us healthy. Now two scientists at the
University of Colorado have dared to ask what kinds of bacteria
lives inside our mouths. And they're finding some pretty
surprising things in there. Ken Krauter, a professor of
microbiology, and Simone Stahringer, a graduate student, took
oral bacteria samples from 45 sets of twins and sequenced the
bacteria's DNA. They thought that identical twins would have
similar types of bacteria living in their mouths, because
identical twins share the same genetic make-up. They were wrong.
The identical twins' bacteria was not any more similar than the
bacteria living in the mouths of fraternal twins, who only share
half of their genes. Furthermore, Krauter and Stahringer, whose
findings were published this week in the jo