These organisms together make up what’s known as a holobiont: a combination of a host, plus all of the resident microbes that live in it and on it. Some of the microorganisms kill each other with toxins, while others leak or release enzymes and nutrients to the benefit of their neighbours. As they compete for space and food, cohabiting microbes have been found to affect the nutrition, development, immune system and behaviour of their hosts. The hosts, for their part, can often manipulate their resident microbiota in many ways, usually via the immune system.
You yourself are swarming with bacteria, archaea, protists and viruses, and might even be carrying larger organisms such as worms and fungi as well. So are you a holobiont, or are you just part of one? Are you a multispecies entity, made up of some human bits and some microbial bits – or are you just the human bits, with an admittedly fuzzy boundary between yourself and your tiny companions?
https://aeon.co/ideas/i-holobiont-are-you-and-your-microbes-a-community-or-a-single-entity?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed
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ReplyDeleteIf I recall right, an average adult human contains ten times more microbial cells of various species than we do human cells.
ReplyDeleteHmm. A recent Israeli Weizmann Institute study is saying there are only 30% more bacterial than human cells. Not sure how many viruses, fungi, and archaea then on top of that. Would need some cross-checking...
ReplyDeleteSakari Maaranen It's difficult to really have a precise estimate of how many microorganism cells we have on and inside us, so take those estimates with a grain of salt. At this moment we don't even know for sure how many different cell types humans have (although this is a different problem, but puts things into perspective).
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