Human Intestinal Cells

Perhaps you’ve seen those DNA tests that genealogy companies advertise on television. They might give a person a sense of their cultural risk factors, but really aren’t very useful in for the specificity of heredity. The next frontier in that genre is microbiome testing—even sequencing. As this piece reports, these tests can indicate risk factors, but are not specific enough to have much medical usefulness. Still, this may be the tip of the iceberg, as the microbial flora of a person’s body far outnumbers the cells that make up a body. MORE

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