## Metadata - Author: [[bbc.com]] - Full Title: More Than Half Your Body Is Not Human - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270 ## Highlights - Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. "That's been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you're about 43% human if you're counting up all the cells," he says.But genetically we're even more outgunned. The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes. But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes. - Prof Knight has performed experiments on mice that were born in the most sanitised world imaginable. Their entire existence is completely free of microbes.He says: "We were able to show that if you take lean and obese humans and take their faeces and transplant the bacteria into mice you can make the mouse thinner or fatter depending on whose microbiome it got."Topping up obese with lean bacteria also helped the mice lose weight. - Prof Knight said: "It's incredible to think each teaspoon of your stool contains more data in the DNA of those microbes than it would take literally a tonne of DVDs to store."At the moment every time you're taking one of those data dumps as it were, you're just flushing that information away. "Part of our vision is, in the not too distant future, where as soon as you flush it'll do some kind of instant read-out and tells you are you going in a good direction or a bad direction. "That I think is going to be really transformative."