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. 2015 Dec 28;7(1):11–20. doi: 10.1080/21655979.2015.1126015

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© 2016 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.

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Figure 2. — The gut microbiome in numbers. On average, the number of bacterial cells living the human gut is 10 times higher than the number of eukaryotic cells that shape the human body, which means that only 10% of the total number of cells in the human body consists of human cells, with the rest coming from symbiotic bacterial cells. Similarly, the combined genomes of the gut microbiota -the microbiome- contain a number of genes ~150 times larger than the human genome (23000 genes).