May 29, 2009
Your Body Is a Wonderland ... of Bacteria
From Science:
Where can you find your skin's most diverse community of bacteria? Not in a sweaty armpit or linty belly button. According to a new survey of the bacterial ecosystem that covers us, the diversity hot spot of the body's exterior is the forearm. And the surprises don't end there.
Microbes that live in and on our bodies outnumber our own cells 10 to one, but researchers have only recently begun to catalog the residents on our skin. Traditionally, scientists identified human skin bacteria by swabbing volunteers and culturing the samples, but those results skewed toward microbes that grow well in the lab. Thanks to ever-evolving gene-sequencing technology, scientists can now use microbial RNA to identify organisms. With these techniques, researchers have found an unexpectedly wide variety of bacteria on human skin (Science, 23 May 2008, p. 1001). But no one had ever systematically compared bacterial colonies from different areas on the human body.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:53 AM | Permalink
Comments
And then there's the project of figuring out what our relationship to those bacteria are. We seem so enamoured of our anti-biotics (including soaps), I don't wonder that we're committing a form of genocide that could ultimately become suicide.
Posted by: Lambness | May 29, 2009 12:06:12 PM
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