12/08/2018 Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells : Nature News

man cells : Nature News & Comment

NATURE | NEWS

Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria

than human cells
Decades-old assumption about microbiota revisited.

Alison Abbott

08 January 2016

SUSUMU NISHINAGA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Red blood cells dominate our total cell count by number (though not by mass).

It's often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one.
That's a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident
microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate.

A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall)
contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron
Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and
Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.

Bacteria bonanza
Those numbers are approximate — another person might have half as many or
found in remote
twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10:1 ratio commonly Amazon village
assumed.

“The numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favour human cells over
bacteria,” they delicately conclude in a manuscript posted to the preprint server bioRxiv1.

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12/08/2018 Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells : Nature News & Comment

The 10:1 myth persisted from a 1972 estimate by microbiologist Thomas Luckey,
which was “elegantly performed, yet was probably never meant to be widely quoted
decades later”, say the paper’s authors. In 2014, molecular biologist Judah Rosner
at the US National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, expressed his doubts about the
10:1 claim, noting that there were very few good estimates for the numbers of
Create a global
human and microbial cells in the body.
microbiome effort

Milo, Sender and Fuchs decided to re-estimate the number by reviewing a wide range of recent experimental
data in the literature, including DNA analyses to calculate cell number and magnetic-resonance imaging to
calculate organ volume. The vast majority of human cells are red blood cells, they note (see 'Counting human
cells').

Source: Ref. 1

Faecal factor
A particular overestimate in Luckey’s work relates to the proportion of bacteria in our guts, Milo and
colleagues say. Luckey estimated that guts contain around 1014 bacteria, by assuming that there were 1011
bacteria in a gram of faeces, and scaling that up by the one-litre volume of the alimentary canal, which
stretches from the mouth to the anus.

But most bacteria reside only in the colon (which has a volume of 0.4 litres), Milo
and colleagues point out — and measurements suggest that there are fewer
bacteria in stool samples than Luckey thought.

Putting together these kinds of calculations, the researchers produce a ratio for
microbial to human cells for the average man of 1.3:1, with a wide uncertainty. Milo Sugar substitutes
linked to obesity
declined to comment on the paper, because it is in review at a scientific journal.

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12/08/2018 Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells : Nature News & Comment

“It is good that we all now have a better estimate to quote,” says Peer Bork, a bioinformatician at the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, who works on the human and other complex
microbiomes. “But I don’t think it will actually have any biological significance.”

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19136

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References

1. Sender, R., Fuchs, S. & Milo, R. Preprint on bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/036103 (2015).

Show context

"Os números são semelhantes o suficiente para que cada evento de defecação possa virar a
proporção para favorecer as células humanas sobre as bactérias", concluem delicadamente em um
manuscrito postado no servidor de pré-impressão bioRxiv 1 in article

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13 May 2014

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