Human Microbiome Project Explores Our 100 Trillion Good Bacteria - NYT

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In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria

By GINA KOLATA

For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of

infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things

to be avoided.

But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of

bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease --- the

100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.

No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life,

needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a

barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like

in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?

In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which

has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80

institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from

nearly 250 healthy people.

They discovered more strains than they ever imagined --- as many as a

thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person's collection

of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person's. To

the scientists' surprise, they also found genetic signatures of

disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone's microbiome. But instead

of making people ill, or even infectious, these disease-causing microbes

simply live peacefully among their neighbors.

The results, published on Wednesday in Nature and three PLoS journals,

are expected to change the research landscape.

The work is " fantastic, " said Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton University

microbiologist who was not involved with the project. " These papers

represent significant steps in our understanding of bacteria in human

health. " ...

The work also helps establish criteria for a healthy microbiome, which

can help in studies of how antibiotics perturb a person's microbiome and

how long it takes the microbiome to recover...