Andrew Perry
The microbiome of the human gastrointestinal tract is a very complex and dynamic internal prokaryotic ecology with incredible variety, diversification, and complexity. This dynamic repository of microorganisms has the world's biggest interactive source and greatest density of bacteria, together forming the world's largest 'diffuse organ system' that is at least as metabolically active as the liver. This microbiome has a significant impact on the health, wellbeing, and vitality of the human host via the extracellular fluid (ECF), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), lymphatic and glymphatic circulation, endocrine, systemic, and neurovascular circulation, and/or the central and peripheral nervous systems (CNS, PNS). The Human Microbiome Initiative (HMI) and the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome (UHGG) consortium recently classified over 200 thousand diverse, non-redundant prokaryotic genomes in the human GI-tract microbiome, involving approximately 5,000 different GI-tract microbes that encode nearly 200 million different protein sequences.
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