THE bacteria in our guts outnumber our own cells by nearly 10 to 1 – and nearly two-thirds of them are new to science.
A team led by Paul Eckburg from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California studied samples from three different people, six taken from regions of the inner lining of the colon and one from faeces.
They identified different bacterial species by comparing the sequence of a gene common to all bacteria. Of 13,000 gene sequences, they found 395 distinct types, each corresponding to a separate species – 244 of them were new.
Each person differed widely…
