Mapping our germs can unlock clues to health

WASHINGTON -- They live on your skin, up your nose, in your gut -- enough bacteria, fungi and other microbes that collected together could weigh, amazingly, a few pounds.

Now scientists have mapped just which critters normally live in or on us and where, calculating that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes.

Don't say "eeew" just yet. Many of these organisms work to keep humans healthy, and results reported yesterday from the government's Human Microbiome Project define what's normal in this mysterious netherworld.

One surprise: It turns out that nearly everybody harbors low levels of some harmful types of bacteria, pathogens known for causing specific infections. But when a person is healthy, as were the 242 U.S. adult volunteers in the project, those bugs quietly coexist with benign or helpful microbes, perhaps kept in check by them.

The next step: Why do the bad bugs harm some people and not others? What changes a person's microbial zoo that increases risk for diseases ranging from infections to irritable bowel syndrome to psoriasis? Already, the findings are reshaping scientists' views of how people stay healthy, or not.

"This is a whole new way of looking at human biology and human disease, and it's awe-inspiring," said Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University at St. Louis, a lead researcher in the $173 million project, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"These bacteria are not passengers," Tarr stressed. "They are metabolically active. As a community, we now have to reckon with them like we have to reckon with the ecosystem in a forest or a body of water."

And like environmental ecosystems, your microbial makeup varies widely by body part. Your skin could be like a rain forest, your intestines teeming with different species like an ocean.

It has long been known that the human body coexists with trillions of individual germs, what's called the microbiome. Until now, research has emphasized those that cause disease. Health officials have said about a third of the population carries Staphylococcus aureus harmlessly in their noses or on their skin, but can infect others.

But no one knew all the types of microbes that live in healthy people or where, and what they do. Some 200 scientists from nearly 80 research institutions worked together for five years on this first-ever census to begin unraveling the DNA of these microbes, with some of the same methods used to decode human genetics.

The results were published yesterday in a series of reports in the journals Nature and the Public Library of Science.