New research indicates there's a pretty huge gap in our knowledge when it comes to our own bodies – it turns out more than 99 percent of the microbes inside us are currently unknown to science.
Researchers have long known that our bodies play host to a range of tiny lifeforms that make us who we are. In fact, recent studies have shown that every human cell within our bodies is outnumbered by roughly 1.3 microbes. And this latest discovery suggests the overwhelming majority of them are totally alien to us. To figure this out, scientists took a close look at the DNA fragments circling in human blood to see what matched up with our current databases of life as we know it. They found that more than 99 percent of the DNA they found didn't belong to lifeforms we currently know about. "We found the gamut," says one of the team, bioengineer Stephen Quake from the Bio-X lab at Stanford University. "We found things that are related to things people have seen before, we found things that are divergent, and we found things that are completely novel." As well as giving us a new sense of just how crazily diverse our internal microbiomes are, the ...