Amanita muscaria is thankfully not one of the fungal species that turned up as part of the human gut's microbiome. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, YUG
The microbiome—that teeming mass of essential and coevolved bacteria and viruses that makes humans more microbe than man—just got a little more diverse. A team of researchers led by scientists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, has revealed a veritable garden of fungal species, dozens of which have never been described before, growing inside the human body. And they link the fungi to the inflammatory bowel disease colitis in a paper published in Science last week.
Cedars-Sinai’s David Underhill, the immunologist who led the team, said that studying the function of the fungal species that inhabit the human gut is an emerging field. "There's not a whole lot out there at this point," he told Wired Science. "People have understood that fungi are there, ...
