The Human Microbiome in Intensive Care – A Journey Forward?

The human microbiome, defined as a personal, genomic signature of our latent or manifest infectious profile (bacterial, viral, fungal), located predominantly in the digestive tract, opens the door to personalized medicine studies on a scale larger than the human genome in terms of data that can be analyzed and interpreted. Compared to the human genome, which has approximately 23,000 genes, the European Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract and the Human Microbiome Project have reported 3.3 million non-redundant microbial genes [1]. [More]