It is believed to be involved in the development of chronic inflammatory intestinal diseases, to trigger diabetes, to be responsible for obesity, even neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s could have their causes here — not to mention depressions and autistic disorders. We are talking about the microbiome — the vast collection of bacteria in the human gut. It is estimated that each person carries around 100 trillion bacterial cells in their digestive tract, belonging to several thousand species.
The microbiome has been the focus of research for 20 years — ever since a new technique made it possible to analyse these bacteria quickly and precisely: high-throughput sequencing. Since then, there has been an increasing body of findings that the microbiome, which is sometimes also referred to as the second human genome, is not only of central importance for…
