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Doctors have long known that even the healthy human body hosts a veritable community of microorganisms.
Now teams of scientists have mapped which bacteria, fungi and other microbes normally live in or on us and where.
And a former Mundys Corner man is one of the principal investigators and a lead author on the latest research paper gaining national attention.
Central Cambria High School graduate Craig Huttenhower is assistant professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.
He is a lead author of the paper “Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome,” published last week in Nature International Weekly Journal of Science.
Huttenhower said he entered the field of bioinformatics
and became involved in the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Human Microbiome project because he saw it as a growing field of investigation.
“There is so much we don’t know,” Huttenhower said in a telephone interview from Harvard.
His specialty, bioinformatics, led the project’s analysis of virtually billions of different DNA sequences using the latest advances in computer programming.
“These are new tools,” Huttenhower explained. “They slice the information different ways and ask different questions of the results of the study.”
The latest results calculate that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes.
These include both those known to be helpful and others that are apparently benign.
There are about 22,000 human genes. But the microbes add to our bodies the power of many, many more – about 8 million genes, the new project estimated.
Bacterial genes produce substances that perform specific jobs, some of which play critical roles in the health and development of their human hosts.
While scientists knew about the helpful bacteria, Huttenhower said they were surprised to learn there isn’t one core set of bacteria that perform those functions. A wide variety can do the same jobs in different people, the researchers found.
Huttenhower compares it to cities. All communities need firefighters, lawyers and electricians, he said, but very different individuals can fill those roles in various cities.
“Even if they are very different individuals doing those jobs, they are tasks that have to be carried out,” Huttenhower said.
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