The Human Microbiome and the Immune System: An Ever Evolving Understanding

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The human body is home to bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, protists, and microscopic animals, all of which comprise the microbiome—all the microbes that “share our body space” [1]. The definition of what makes us human needs to account for the traits provided by these microorganisms as well as for the fact that we did not have to evolve on our own [2]. Work on the Human Genome Project [3] led to the realization that decoding the human genome would not provide the full picture for understanding human biology, as the microbial communities in/on our bodies by far exceed our own cells in number and gene content [4].