Decoded the genome of an intestinal bacteria

2003/05/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Genetika

Researchers at the St. Louis Medical School have decoded the genome of the bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. It consists of four thousand eight hundred genes, of which more than one hundred encode proteins for the recovery of sugars of the intestine.

According to the researchers, knowing the genome of microorganisms living in the human body will help to better understand the interactions between them. In the human intestine there are at least a thousand species of bacteria and, overall, they are estimated to contain a hundred times more genes than human genomes. Thanks to these bacteria, humans are able, for example, to metabolize certain foods that by themselves we cannot crush.