The human microbiome
Me, myself, us
Looking at human beings as ecosystems that contain many collaborating and competing species could change the practice of medicine
Aug 18th 2012 | from the print edition

WHAT’S a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body’s surface.

Read more:

http://www.economist.com/node/21560523

There was a piece about this in the May Scientific American……this interactive thingy is from their website:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microbiome-graphic-explore-human-microbiome

>The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual

Good job they can’t talk, eh.

“A lot of the medical conditions the microbiome is being implicated in are puzzling. They seem to run in families, but no one can track down the genes involved. This may be because the effects are subtly spread between many different genes. But it may also be that some—maybe a fair few—of those genes are not to be found in the human genome at all.
Though less reliably so than the genes in egg and sperm, microbiomes, too, can be inherited. Many bugs are picked up directly from the mother at birth. Others arrive shortly afterwards from the immediate environment. It is possible, therefore, that apparently genetic diseases whose causative genes cannot be located really are heritable, but that the genes which cause them are bacterial.
This is of more than merely intellectual interest. Known genetic diseases are often hard to treat and always incurable. The best that can be hoped for is a course of drugs for life. But the microbiome is medically accessible and manipulable in a way that the human genome is not. It can be modified, both with antibiotics and with transplants. If the microbiome does turn out to be as important as current research is hinting, then a whole new approach to treatment beckons.”

Interesting

Is there a microbiomologist in the house?