A Closer Look at the Microbes That Live on — and in — Us
The vast terrain that the human body provides the world of microbes has found its cartographer.
For the first time, a consortium of scientists organized by the National Institutes of Health has fully mapped the microbial makeup of healthy humans. The data, in 16 papers published simultaneously Wednesday, will shed light on how the flora and fauna that occupy the human landscape shape its health.
To characterize these invisible colonizers, known en masse as the ‘human microbiome,’ scientists with the Human Microbiome Project Consortium collected tissue samples from 242 healthy American volunteers from several different locations on their bodies.