Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

Great to be here.

i am a true novice when it comes to the microbiome so i'd like to start off with a really basic question which is what is the microbiome i think you know just to start off with clarifying terminology microbiome and microbiota quite often are used to refer to our microbial community interchangeably and i'll probably switch between those two terms today the other important thing to realize is that these microbes are

not just in our gut, but they're all over our body.

They're in our nose, they're in our mouths, they're on our skin, basically anywhere that the environment can get to in our body, which includes inside our digestive tract, of course, is colonized with microbes.

And the vast majority of these are in our distal gut and in our colon.

And so this is the gut microbiota or gut microbiome.

And

The density of this community is astounding.

You start off with a zoomed out view and you see something that looks like, you know, fecal material, the digest inside the gut.

And you zoom in and you start to, you know, get to the microscopic level and see the microbes.

They are just packed, you know, side to side, end to end.

It's a super dense environment.

bacterial community, almost like a biofilm, to the point where it's thought that around 30% of fecal matter is microbes, 30 to 50%.

So it's an incredibly dense microbial community.

We're talking of trillions of microbial cells.

And all those microbial cells, if you start to get to know them and see who they are, break out in the gut probably to hundreds to a thousand species.

Most of these are bacteria, but there are a lot of other life forms there.

There are archaea, which are little microbes that are bacteria-like, but they're different.

There are eukaryotes.

So we commonly think of eukaryotes in the gut as...