The human body is teeming with more than 35 trillion bacteria, coexisting in microbiomes inside the gut, mouth, lungs, skin and urogenital tract. While it’s now clear these microbes are associated with health and disease, scientists have only begun to uncover the full scale of their biology and functions.
From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.
Huh, I thought for decades that the number of bacteria in a single human is more like 100 quadrillion, so more than a magnitude of difference from the article.
Either way I am but am a mule for the Little Masters.
Maybe they’r talking about the kinds of microbies
You mean Prevotella? No, I think it’s a hand-wave reference to all our microbiome:
The human body is teeming with more than 35 trillion bacteria, coexisting in microbiomes inside the gut, mouth, lungs, skin and urogenital tract.
The article then goes on to use Prevotella genus as an example.
Wikipedia agrees with the article, claiming estimates of about 38 trillion, so my previous understanding was sorely outdated apparently. The relative numbers of human cells to our personal biome are somewhat equal.
