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Armpits: 'Rain Forests' For Bacteria |
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Written by Mike Cohen
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Monday, 01 June 2009 |
Eeeww. There's a zoo full of critters living on your skin -- a bacterial zoo, that is. Consider your underarm a rain forest. Healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants.
And that's not a bad thing, said genetics specialist Julia Segre of the National Institutes of Health, who led the research.
Sure
they make your sneakers stinky, "but they also keep your skin moist and
make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria don't enter your
bloodstream," she said. "We take a lot for granted in terms of how much
they contribute to our health."
People's bodies are ecosystems,
believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that
naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But
scientists don't have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much
less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health.
The
NIH's "Human Microbiome Project" aims to change that, recruiting
healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbor so scientists can
compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry -- from acute
infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis or irritable bowel
syndrome.
The skin research, published in Friday's edition of
the journal Science, is part of that project. Scientists decoded the
genes of 112,000 bacteria in samples taken from a mere 20 spots on the
skin of 10 people. Those numbers translated into roughly 1,000 strains,
or species, of bacteria, Segre said, hundreds more than ever have been
found on skin largely because the project used newer genetic techniques
to locate them.
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