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Immunology, the microbiome and future perspectives

Published on April 30, 2019   30 min

Other Talks in the Series: Periodic Reports: Advances in Clinical Interventions and Research Platforms

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0:00
Hello, my name is Professor Sheena Cruikshank, I'm an Immunologist from the University of Manchester and I'm going to be talking today about immunology and the microbiome and some future perspectives in microbiome research.
0:16
The reason I think the microbiome is so interesting is that the moment more than ever we are just being assaulted with lots and lots of headlines and information about the microbiome where it's being linked with a whole host of things from health and happiness to our well-being, sleep, depression. Everything is being linked to the microbiome and there's a huge market and how to manipulate the microbiome with things like probiotics market being worth billions and recipes to alter your microbiome in some really extreme suggestions and health sites as to what you can do to really change your microbiome. But how much of this is fact, how much of this is fiction, and to really start to unpick that I think it's really important that we start to understand what we mean by the microbiome. There are two terms that are usually used when we're talking about the microbiome and that is microbiota which tends to refer to the species that are present in and on our bodies, and the microbiome which refers to the genetic content and that's the way that I will try and use those terms throughout this talk.
1:25
When I talk about the microbiome, what I'm referring to is the organisms that live inside us and on us and these include yeast, fungi, bacteria, and viruses and even a few parasites. But at the moment we know the most about the bacteria that live inside us and on us and it's been estimated that there are 38 trillion bacteria resident in us and on us. So each of us has this huge community of bacteria.

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Immunology, the microbiome and future perspectives

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