Microbes, Microbiota, and the Ecosystems you live with.

You remember that first science lecture you had in middle school, the one where you learned you have a bunch of tiny microbes crawling all over your face? It gets worse… How would you feel knowing if you take the number of human cells vs bacteria in your human microbiota (fancy word for cell community in/on your body) you’re only about 10% human? There are 10 trillion human cells in your body, but you have as many as 100 trillion other microbials living in your unique ecosystem. There’s a difference between microbiota and microbiome, and it has to do with organization. Microbiotas are cell communities from a specific location of the body (mouth, lungs, palms, etc.) and are based on the organismal level. Microbiomes deal with the collections of genes found in those microbiotas.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

If you think of your body as a huge ecosystem, you can start to consider how your body has a variety in its biogeography. There’s a pretty big difference in the diversity of microbes based on where you’re sampling from. You can imagine that the palms of your hands that are touching everything have a different microbe make-up than your forehead or armpit. You can drill down even deeper too, taking the mouth, for example, the tongue would have different bacteria than the teeth. Even more specifically, individual teeth can present differences in bacterial presence.

So how do we get our microbiomes? Your mom. More specifically, it’s introduced during labor/birth, and nuances like vaginal vs c-section can alter the starting colonies of what your microbiome turns into. Research is being done to see if there are direct benefits to introducing the bacteria after a C-section birth; Caesarean births are associated with higher rates of diseases like asthma and food allergies (I can attest, I had bad asthma and was a removal baby).

Microbial ecosystems are always being introduced to new factors: where we live, who/what we interact with, what we eat, and the drugs we consume. These interactions start at birth but continue on as we grow, develop, and live our lives; and amazingly we each have drastically different ecosystems from one another. These microbes perform helpful and harmful functions that directly play a role in our health.

If you want to learn more here’s the resource I’m using to dive deeper into microbiomes.