科学家告诉你：你身体里过半组成不是人类

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

科学家说，人超过一半的身体部分不是人类。

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

人体细胞仅占身体细胞总数的43％。其余的是微观殖民者。

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves - our microbiome - is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

理解关于我们的隐藏的一半，即我们的微生物群， 正在迅速转变人们对过敏和帕金森病的认识。

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be "human" and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

该领域甚至提出了“人类”意味着什么的问题，并导致了新的创新疗法。

"They are essential to your health," says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, "your body isn’t just you".

“它们对你的健康至关重要，”马克斯普朗克研究所微生物组科学系主任Ruth Ley教授说，“你的身体不仅仅是你”。

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

无论你洗得多干净，你的身体几乎每个角落都会被微生物覆盖。

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.

这包括细菌，病毒，真菌和古细菌（最初被误分类为细菌的生物体）。这种微生命最集中的地方是我们黑暗浑浊的缺氧的肠道的深处。

Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: "You’re more microbe than you are human."

加州大学圣地亚哥分校的罗布奈特教授告诉BBC：“比其人类，我们更多是由微生物组成。”

Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.

原先的认识是我们人类本身的细胞数量超过10比1。

"That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells," he says.

“这已经更新为接近一比一了，所以目前的估计是，如果你将所有的细胞计算在内，你大约有43％的部分是人类，”他说。

But genetically we’re even more outgunned.

但从遗传角度看，我们更加处于下风。

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

人类基因组 - 人类的全套基因指令 - 由20,000个称为基因的指令组成。

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

但是将我们微生物群中的所有基因加在一起，这个数字就出现在两百万到两千万个微生物基因之间。

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: "We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.

加州理工学院的微生物学家Sarkis Mazmanian教授认为：“我们不只有一个基因组，我们微生物组的基因基本上是第二个基因组，它增加了我们自己的活动。”

"What makes us human is, in my opinion, the combination of our own DNA, plus the DNA of our gut microbes."

“在我看来，让我们成为人类的是我们自己的DNA和我们肠道微生物的DNA的结合。”

It would be naive to think we carry around so much microbial material without it interacting or having any effect on our bodies at all.

认为我们携带如此多的微生物物质而没有相互作用或对我们的身体有任何影响是天真的。

Science is rapidly uncovering the role the microbiome plays in digestion, regulating the immune system, protecting against disease and manufacturing vital vitamins.

科学正在迅速揭示微生物在消化，调节免疫系统，预防疾病和制造重要维生素方面的作用。