An interesting recent development is a growing awareness of bacteria. It’s now r

Question

An interesting recent development is a growing awareness of bacteria. It’s now realized that the total biomass of bacteria on earth far outweighs all animals, plants, and other complex living beings put together. A recent claim is that “there are 10 times as many bacterial cells in a typical human body as there are human cells.” If we don’t count blood and bone (about 20% of your mass), estimate the fraction of your mass that is bacterial and not “you”. (A set of approximate biological scales is shown below.)

Be sure to clearly state your assumptions and how you came to the numbers you estimated, since grading on this problem will be mostly based on your reasoning, not on your answer.

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

In the human body, there are several parts and most of the organs are habitated by the bacteria depending on the environmental conditions such as temperature, pH. Bacteria are present in almost all parts of the body as a normal flora, these normal flora dont cause any diseases but they stay on the body and somtimes protect the body. Some bacteria are oppurtunistic such as pseuodomonas, which causes diseases when person lost immune response.

Research finding shows that human body contains nearly 100 trillion cells, but it is assumed that one in 10 of those cells are of human, and others cells are from bacteria, viruses and fungal cells.Studies identified that, nearly 10,000 species of microorganisms in human body.These 10,000 or so species together form approximately 8 million genes,when compared with human genes it is more than 300 times.

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