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Published online 28 May 2008 | Nature 453, 578-580 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453578a
News Feature
Microbiology: The inside story
The human body teems with microbes. In this, the first of two features, Asher Mullard looks at the global efforts to catalogue this vast 'microbiome'. In the second, Apoorva Mandavilli meets the surgeons who have a rare opportunity to watch an ecosystem being established as they transplant guts from one person to another.
Any story about a human's microbes tends to invoke impressive numbers. Take the 10 trillion or so microbial cells living in the gut, which exceed the number of human cells by 10 to 1.
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Some vitamins can't be synthesised in human. Can we take some microbes which can overproducing vitamins into gut of human to settle this problem?
========================= ...their bacterial profiles changed to look more like those of the lean people. The theory, based on studies in mice3, is that part of the propensity to gain weight might lie in 'obesity-causing' bacteria in the gut that release more calories from food than those found in lean people. ========================= The paragraph shows the 'obesity-causing' bacteria acts differently in different environment. It is not to say that the obese is resulted from the bacteria.