A team of scientists claim that the human gut holds microbes containing millions of genes. The researchers outnumber the 23,000 or so genes in the human genome and hope that the team work will help us better comprehend how to keep a healthy balance in our gut flora along with improving diagnosis and treatment of disease.

The research paper for this was published in the 4 March online issue of Nature.

The research is reported to be coordinated by Dr Dusko Ehrlich at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, in France, and is the joint effort of scientists working on a European project called MetaHIT (Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract) in collaboration with Dr Jun Wang and colleagues at the Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, China.

Also, the team reveals that Gut flora is beneficial to human health as it comprises of thousands of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that remove toxins make vitamins and essential amino acids, creating a wide barrier against external agents. As a part of the study, researchers used fecal samples from 124 Europeans.

Some of them were healthy, while others were obese or overweight. Some even had inflammatory bowel disease.