Each of us has our own distinctive microbiome, sculpted by the genes we inherited, the places we’ve lived in, the drugs we’ve taken, the food we’ve eaten, the years we’ve lived, the hands we’ve shaken. Microbially, we are similar but different. When microbiologists first started cataloguing the human microbiome in its entirety they hoped to discover a “core” microbiome: a group of species that everyone shares. It’s now debatable if that core exists.
