medpundit |
||
|
Tuesday, February 06, 2007Human skin is a "virtual zoo" of bacteria, say researchers who have identified more than 200 species in samples taken from the forearm. About 8% of the species were previously unknown, according to the study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ......In the first set of analysis, the team found 182 species of bacteria, but at the repeated test a further 65 showed up. Just over half of the bacteria found in the skin samples belonged to species that were already known to be common - Propionibacteria, Corynebacteria, Staphylococcus and Streptococcus. And 8% were species that had not previously been described in the literature. Almost three-quarters of the total number of bacterial species were unique to individual volunteers, suggesting the skin is "highly diversified". Our bacteria, ourselves. posted by Sydney on 2/06/2007 08:38:00 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:In contrast to skin, the number of bacteria in the human gut is enormous and numbers in trillions. The number of species is thought to be 500-100 although most of bacterial gut flora is probably accounted for by far fewer number of species. By 9:21 PM , at |
|