US scientists have begun the daunting task of trying to work out how many genes there are in the human microbiome.
Even when you consider just the gut and the mouth (in itself, a unique research double) the numbers are potentially overwhelming.
Microbiologists and bioinformaticians from Harvard Medical School and Joslin Diabetes Centre gathered all publicly available sequencing data on human oral and gut microbiomes and analyzed the DNA from around 3500 samples – 1400 from mouths and 2100 from guts.
Comments are closed.