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the importance of bacteria in the human digestive system |
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What role does bacteria play in the human digestive system? FOR BACKGROUND OR TO BE ADDED AS LEARNING POINTS:
You're more microbe than human - if you count all the cells in your body, only 43% are human
- The rest is our microbiome and includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and single-celled archaea
- The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes
- But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out at between two million and 20 million microbial genes
- It's known as the second genome and is linked to diseases including allergy, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's, whether cancer drugs work and even depression and autism
- The microbiome has the same mass as your brain.
from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43785523 |
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