Important Research
CJ March 3rd, 2009
Did you know…
That human spit doesn’t vary much in bacteria content? Me neither! Wow, I feel better now.
Dollars well spent.
The human mouth is a major gateway for bacteria into the body and it contains a diverse array of microbial species. Yet scientists know little about this diversity and how it relates to diet, environment, health and disease, they added.
“We are interested in this because by studying the bacteria we can get more insights into human populations than we would get from just studying the human DNA,” Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
In their study published in Genome Research, the team sequenced bacteria found in saliva samples taken from 120 healthy volunteers from North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.
Not surprisingly, they observed considerable diversity of bacterial life in the overall saliva microbiome, both within and between individuals.
But when comparing samples from different geographic areas they found not much variation, suggesting that bacteria within the mouth of a person’s neighbor is likely to be just as different as someone on the other side of the world.
Courtesy of Yahoo Odd News
