Podcasts & RSS Feeds Science, Health and Technology Thu June 14,
2012 We’re not alone: healthy humans have more microbes than
cells The bacterium Enterococcus faecalis, which lives in the
human gut, is just one type of microbe that was studied as part
of the Human Microbiome Project funded by the National
Institutes of Health (NIH). Researchers have completed the first
comprehensive census of the human “microbiome” — the trillions
of bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that live in and
on our bodies. The associate director of Washington University’s
Genome Institute, George Weinstock, was one of the project’s
lead researchers. He says we have about ten times more microbial
cells in our body than we have human cells. “If we add up all
the genes in those microbes, there’s probably a hundred times or
more microbial genes in our body than there are genes in our
human genome,” Weinstock said. “So the microbes, they’re not
just a small little part of us, they’re really a very, very
large, perhaps almost dom