Your microbiome is essentially another organ in your body. You have 10 times the number of bacteria cells as you do human cells (they are a lot smaller) and the

Your microbiome is essentially another organ in your body. You have 10 times the number of bacteria cells as you do human cells (they are a lot smaller) and they weigh over 2 pounds. Problems with this microbiome have been associated with very important diseases including autism, malnutrition and heart attacks. The economist had a good semi-science summary back in August last year [1]. I would recommend being just as careful getting a fecal transplant as any other organ, it would be terrible to catch something you didn't want like hepatitis. It will likely be a while still until we understand the microbiome as the current sequencing methods only can sequence about ~1000 nucleotides at a time [2]. The strategy is to shred all the DNA into smaller pieces, sequence them and then try to assemble them back into the full genome. This is difficult to do in just single organisms and becomes very difficult when you're dealing with a soup of many different organisms in something like your gut. Hopefully we can make some good progress associating smaller chunks of sequence with phenotypes until we can sequence full chromosome lengths of dna. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21560523 http://www.economist.com/node/21560523 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing