William Atkins
Friday, 06 November 2009 21:45
Science -
Biology
Page 1 of 2
To find out how people differ with respect to bacteria and the onset of human diseases, researchers from Colorado and Missouri checked out 27 different locations on healthy adults. What they found out may surprise you!
The November 5, 2009 article
Bacterial Community Variation in Human Body Habitats Across Space and Time is published in the journal
Science.
It is authored by Elizabeth K. Costello, Christian L. Lauber, Micah Hamady, Noah Fierer, and Rob Knight, all from the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Jeffrey I. Gordon, from the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis, Missouri.
The U.S. researchers swabbed up to 27 different locations of seven to nine healthy adults at four different times over a time period of about three months.
These different locations included mouths, navels, armpits, ear canals, nostrils, head hair, palms on hands, index fingers, and backs of knees.
They used DNA sequences on the swabbed samples to determine the different types of bacteria at each location.
They found that the type of bacteria and the number of bacteria was determined
“primarily by body habitat.”
The group of researchers performing the work said that their study is the largest one ever performed on the
“community of microbes” on the human body.
On average, they estimate that about 100 trillion individual bacteria are on or inside the human body.
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