Not Outnumbered by Bacteria
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It’s often said that the bacteria inside us outnumber our own cells by 10 to one, but another new study claims that is wide off the mark. Ron Sender and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, estimate that we have roughly equal numbers of human and bacterial cells – each about 30 trillion. (Biorxiv,http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/036103)The 10:1 ratio comes from a paper written by T. D. Luckey in 1972. Luckey worked out that we each have about 1014 bacteria in our bodies, but this was a back-of-the-envelope calculation and he probably never intended for his estimate to be so widely quoted decades later.Using newer evidence, Sender and his colleagues estimate that there are 3.9 x 1013 bacteria in a human body and 3 x 1013 human cells, 84 per cent of them red blood cells. The two populations are so finely balanced that a visit to the toilet may tip the balance in favour of human cells – we shed about a third of the bacteria in our colon each time we defecate.Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28766-your-guts-trick-for-controlling-the-bacteria-that-live-in-it/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC%7CNSNS%7C2016-GLOBAL-hoot
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