Photo by NIAID
Apparently we’re healthier than we thought!!
Throughout the 20th century, scientists who studied the microbiome had thought that humans contain around 9000 times more germs than human cells. Scientists now believe, however, that that number is more like 30 percent.
Micro biologists: Ron Sender, Ron Milo, and Shai Fuchs took on the challenge to actually find out the ratio of bacteria to cells in the human body. First, its important to know the types of cells that make up the human body. One might think that muscle and fat cells make up the largest portion of human cells in the body but that is wildly incorrect. In fact, despite their weight and size dominance, they make up a measly .2 percent of the body’s cells while blood cells make up 90 percent (mostly red blood cells).
The colon houses the most bacteria in the human body by a long shot. This makes sense as it is the pathway for human feces out of the body and reaches up to 5 feet in length. The “trio” of scientists estimate that the human body contains somewhere between 30 trillion and 50 trillion cells and that the bacterial count is around 30 to 60 percent higher than the amount of cells.
Now, despite the insightful findings of Sender, Milo, and Fuchs, the microbiome community still has a lot of research to do into the subject of germ:cell ratio in humans and scientists believe that the trio missed some important factors in their experiments and as geneticist Julie Segre points out, “Other researchers also point out that the new paper’s calculations focused on bacteria. Yet the body can host other types of microbes as well. Those include viruses, fungi and archaea (Ar-KEE-uh). Viruses tend to vastly outnumber bacteria, so they could skew the microbe-to-human cell ratio upwards.”
The most important and prevailing part of the trio’s research was that the amount of bacteria that we have in our body and attached to human cells is much less than we had previously believed.
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