Tackling the various myths within the field of microbiome research

Subject :Science and Technology

Section: Biotechnology

Context:

According to an assessment published in Nature Microbiology, it is a myth that the microbes in our bodies outnumber our own cells 10 to one.

Details of the assessment study:

Done by researchers from Israel and Canada.
A 70 kg “reference man” to have 38 trillion bacterial cells and 30 trillion human cells.

The following are some claims that the assessment checked:

Scientists had described and speculated on the benefits of bacteria inhabiting the gut, such as Escerichia coli and Bifidobacteria, as early as the late 19th and early 20th centuries itself.
Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate in medicine, was credited with the naming of the field in 2001. According to a June 2017 paper, Whipps J.M., Lewis K., and Cooke R.C. had used the term in 1988 to describe a community of microbes.
The absolute microbial cells in one gram of human faeces have been exaggerated 10-to-100 fold. According to the authors, the actual number is around 10^10 to 10^12.
It weighed about 200 grams.
Mothers don’t pass their microbiomes to their children at birth. Some microorganisms are directly transferred during birth but they constitute a small fraction of the human microbiota.
A microbe and its metabolite can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Diseases have been correlated with changes in the composition of the microbiome.
While different bacteria in the human microbiome perform some common important functions, many functions are the preserve of a few species.
Sequencing of microbes is biased from collecting samples to storing them, even in the choice of software to analyse sequence data.

What are microbiomes?

The microbiome is the community of microorganisms (such as fungi, bacteria and viruses) that exists in a particular environment. In humans, the term is often used to describe the microorganisms that live in or on a particular part of the body, such as the skin or gastrointestinal tract.

Source: TH