99% of The Microbes in Our Own Bodies Are Still a Total Mystery to Science

We’re seeing incredible scientific discoveries being made every day, but new research indicates there’s a pretty huge gap in our knowledge when it comes to our own bodies – it turns out more than 99 percent of the microbes inside us are currently unknown to science.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

99% of The Microbes in Our Own Bodies Are Still a Total Mystery to Science

We’re seeing incredible scientific discoveries being made every day, but new research indicates there’s a pretty huge gap in our knowledge when it comes to our own bodies – it turns out more than 99 percent of the microbes inside us are currently unknown to science.

more…

> recent studies have shown that every human cell within our bodies is outnumbered by roughly 1.3 microbes

Thank you for the precise number 1.3.

> To figure this out, scientists took a close look at the DNA fragments circling in human blood to see what matched up with our current databases of life as we know it. They found that more than 99 percent of the DNA they found didn’t belong to lifeforms we currently know about. “We found the gamut,” says one of the team, bioengineer Stephen Quake from the Bio-X lab at Stanford University. “We found things that are related to things people have seen before, we found things that are divergent, and we found things that are completely novel.”

Good.

> The majority of this non-human DNA belonged to a type of bacteria called proteobacteria, which includes E. coli and Salmonella among its many species. Previously unidentified viruses were also turned up, from the torque teno family. “We’ve now found a whole new class of human-infecting ones that are closer to the animal class than to the previously known human ones, so quite divergent on the evolutionary scale,”

This is seriously good work.

> we identified hundreds of new bacteria and viruses which represent previously unidentified members of the human microbiome.

But care needs to be taken in interpreting that “99%”. Following the PNAS link. If “hundreds” represents 99% then the article is claiming that <10 bacteria and viruses in the human body are known, which is wildly false.

> 7,190 contiguous regions (contigs) larger than 1 kbp, of which 3,761 are novel.

So, instead of 99% still a total mystery, the real percentage is closer to 3761 / 7190 = 52%.