The universe of microbes that lives in your stomach may be nearly as unique as your fingerprint, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine who have embarked on the early stages of exploring the intestinal ecosystem.
Using molecular techniques that detect all known types of microbes and borrowing statistical techniques from field ecology and population genetics, Paul Eckburg, MD, a postdoctoral scholar in infectious diseases and geographic medicine, conducted the most extensive study to date surveying the inhabitants of the lower digestive tract. In the three healthy subjects he studied, he found 395 unique bacterial species.
"The intestinal flora is critical to human physiology and a wide spectrum of disease, but the first step in studying this ecosystem is to figure out who is there and how the community census varies in time and space," said Eckburg, the lead author of the study published in this week’s online edition of Science Express. "But even with this large sequencing project, which produced orders of magnitude more sequence data than had been generated in the past, we are not completely there yet. This is just the tip of the iceberg."
Mitzi Baker | EurekAlert!
Further information:
http://www.stanford.edu
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