Bacterial Fingerprint: There is the possibility that microbial DNA may contain even more information about a person than does their human DNA.LUCY READING-IKKANDA
We are human beings. Normally, one might take this to mean that, at least on a biological level, we are defined by our own genome. But living in and on the human body is an ecosystem of microorganisms that outnumber our own cells by at least a factor of ten. It is estimated that there are 100 times as many microbial genes as human genes associated with our bodies. Taken together, these microbial communities are known as the human microbiome. Recent technological and scientific advances, mainly in the field of metagenomics, are rapidly enriching our knowledge of the genomes and functions of many of these microbial communities.
The ultimate aim of much of this research is to discover how perturbations of the microbiome might be ...
