Meet your microbes

The human body is home to all sorts of microbes that live in our guts, on our skin, and more. Scientists working on the Human Microbiome Project have just published the first detailed studies of these microscopic organisms (see this press release). Bruce Birren, in a talk given during a Midsummer Nights' Science series, describes these efforts to comprehensively catalog the microbes, decode their genetic information, and examine their roles in disease.