Learning to tolerate our microbial self
Thursday, April 21, 2011 - 13:30
in Biology & Nature
The human gut is filled with 100 trillion symbiotic bacteriaten times more microbial cells than our own cellsrepresenting close to one thousand different species. "And yet, if you were to eat a piece of chicken with just a few Salmonella, your immune system would mount a potent inflammatory response," says Sarkis K. Mazmanian, assistant professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).