Intestinal bacteria, calling your body “home”

You can wash that man right out of your hair, but you can’t scrub your inner elbow free of bacteria. In the forthcoming issue of Genome Research, Julia Segre and colleagues catalog six types of bacteria that thrive in the inner elbow.

Call it biodiversity with an ick factor. The research is part of the NIH Human Microbiome Project, an effort to identify and analyze all the bacterial colonies that call the human body home.

The New York Times reports that the project — still in its early stages — is already challenging the conventional wisdom on what it means to be human:

“Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.”

Disfranchised by our own microbiota — now that’s a scenario that even Karl Rove probably never imagined.

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