Your microbiome–you actually have several. As the massive amount of research continues to accumulate, it is becoming more and more apparent how important your gut microbiome is (“microbiota of the gut”, formerly “gut flora”). There is much to share on this subject, so I will return to this resource soon to add additional information. For now, I urge you to consider the following few videos:
Added 10/03/2018 11:30 AM
How the Gut Microbiome affects the Brain and Mind: (13 minutes)
How Bacteria Rule Over Your Body – The Microbiome: (7 minutes)
Highly recommended!
Me, My Microbiome, And I – The Vital Cells Of Existence: (87 minutes)
The gut microbiome in health and in disease
Purpose of review
Recent technological advancements and expanded efforts have led to a tremendous growth in the collective knowledge of the human microbiome. This review will highlight some of the important recent findings in this area of research.
Recent findings
Studies have described the structure and functional capacity of the bacterial microbiome in the healthy state and in a variety of disease states. Downstream analyses of the functional interactions between the host and its microbiome are starting to provide mechanistic insights into these interactions. These data are anticipated to lead to new opportunities for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of a variety of human diseases.
Summary
There is a fast growing collection of data describing the structure and functional capacity of the microbiome in a variety of conditions available to the research community for consideration and further exploration. Ongoing efforts to further characterize the functions of the microbiome and the mechanisms underlying host-microbe interactions will provide a better understanding of the role of the microbiome in health and disease.
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Accumulation of data on the human microbiome
The tremendous expansion of information collected on the human microbiome in recent years is highlighted by data generated through several large-scale endeavors to characterize the human microbiome, namely the European Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT) and the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project (HMP) (6, 7). In 2010, the initial MetaHIT consortium study reported sequencing 3.3 million non-redundant fecal microbial genes, representing almost 200 times the quantity of microbial DNA sequences reported in all previous studies (7). In July 2014, a combined set of metagonomic sequencing data from 1267 gut metagenomes from 1070 individuals, including 760 European samples from MetaHIT, 139 American samples from HMP and 368 Chinese samples from a large diabetes study, was published with a non-redundant gene catalog of 9.8 million microbial genes (*8). Each sample contained about 750,000 genes or about 30 times the number of genes in the human genome, and less than 300,000 genes were shared by greater than 50% of individuals. The majority of the new genes identified in this latest study were relatively rare, found in less than 1% of individuals. This collection is thought to contain nearly a complete set of genes for most human gut bacteria and illustrates the quantity and variability of the human microbiome.
Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4290017/
Why the Gut Microbiome Is Crucial for Your Health
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gut-microbiome-and-health