ST. LOUIS, June 1 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have conducted a year-long experiment analyzing trillions of microbes that reside in the human large intestine.
"This is the densest bacterial ecosystem known in nature," Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience.com. "The density of colonization of the distal gut is just enormous."
The human large intestine is a 5-foot long, twisting tube, whose main function is to remove all available water and nutrients from feces before it is expelled.
Helping in that task are up to 100 trillion individual microbes, representing more than 1,000 species, LiveScience said.
Gordon used fecal samples from two healthy adult volunteers who did not receive any antibiotics or other medications for one year prior to the study. Gordon and colleagues then collected, analyzed and described more than 60,000 genes from each individual.
The team's findings are expected to help researchers determine if internal microbial communities in the human body are evolving as a result of changing diets and lifestyles.
The study appears in the journal Science.
