Essay --

The bodily cells that one is born with are not solely responsible for the defense mechanisms and growth of an individual. Rather, shortly after being born our bodies begin to acquire a large variety of microorganisms that are responsible for many of the functions that allow life to occur. This community of mixed foreign microbial cells and all of their specific genes is known as a microbiome. Every individual contains their own unique microbiome as a result of their own unique exposures. This variation among the human population has allowed researchers to better understand health situations of different individuals. It is only with technological advances that allow scientists to scratch the surface of the significances of the microbial world. Furthermore, these advances have allowed us to identify species by matching them to their genes and even quantify the number of bacterial genes in the body. A group of European scientists found that there were 3.3 million bacterial genes in the human digestive track, over 150 times more than the amount of genes found in the entire human ge...