by Ed Yong
I'll admit I didn't read every word of this. It's full of multitudes of words and I ran out of steam halfway, reading only tidbits and snippets. I have to either mark it as "read" or delete it, and since I want to preserve it in my record (and not accidentally read it again), it'll have to be "read."
It's excellent, by the way. Full of all sorts of very detailed details about how microbes rule--and sometimes ruin--our lives. More than you'd ever hoped to learn about microbiomes and how the same bacteria can turn up in lots of different places performing entirely different functions for different hosts. It's pretty miraculous.
The book is well written and easy to understand, and my only issue was that he seemed to hop from topic to topic without pause. There's just so much to tell, you know.
And finally, here's an example--and an interesting point.
The microbiome is not a constant entity. It is a teeming collection of thousands of species, all constantly competing with one another, negotiating with their host, evolving, changing. It wavers and pulses over a 24-hour cycle, so that some species are more common in the day while other rise at ngiht. Your genome is almost certainly the same as it was last year, but your microbiome has shifted since your last meal or sunrise.
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