BIOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY
Applications of the Human Microbiome Hanson Wen
I n 2 0 0 7, T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s National Institutes of Health research started a project called the Human Microbiome Project [1], which means from then on, the science community had accepted the human microbiome as an important subject. The human microbiome has been chosen as one of the ten science breakthroughs of the year in 2011 by the Science magazine [2]. Other famous science magazines have also started including the Microbiome section from then on. But what is it? The definition of it in simple terms is all of the microorganisms in a human in a specific area such as skin, lungs, mammary glands, placenta and so on.
The microbiome can take up to 4% of your weight and can do many things. For example, scientists have discovered that humans cannot digest seaweed because no enzymes coded by the human genome can break down the carbohydrates that are tangled with sulfur molecules which are within the plant. But what happens when we eat seaweed? There is a type of marine bacteria (Zobellia galactanivorans) that can digest seaweed, and the same kind of enzyme that these bacteria produce has been found in the human-gut bacteria of Japanese individuals [3]. The microbiome can give us power where we are lacking.
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