Dr. Rob Knight featured on BBC to talk about the topic, “More than half your body is not human”
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Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.”
Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.
“That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says.
But genetically we’re even more outgunned.
The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.
But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.
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Prof Knight said: “We’re finding ways that these tiny creatures totally transform our health in ways we never imagined until recently.”
It is a new way of thinking about the microbial world. To date, our relationship with microbes has largely been one of warfare.
