Microbial Ecosystem Quotes

We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms.

You think of yourselves as human beings, but I think of you as 99 percent bacterial.

With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world

We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds - the same as our brain.

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

You live in intimate association with bacteria, and you couldn't survive without them.

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms - a hundred trillion or more.

Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.