Synonyms
Definition
The human gut microbiome is a community of roughly 40 trillion bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protozoa which reside within the human gastrointestinal tract. Variations in gut microbiome composition have been implicated in a variety of psychological, physiological, and behavioral traits.
Introduction
A variety of environments, including many human organs, contain within them communities of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa and viruses. This community is collectively referred to as the microbiome or microbiota. Traditionally, the term microbiota was used to refer to the community of organisms, and microbiome to refer to the collective genomes of organisms within those communities. While the term microbiome can still refer to a set of collective genetic material, these two terms are also now used synonymously to refer to the community of organisms within a given environment (Ursell et al. 2012). The human gastrointestinal tract...
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Lynch, K.E. (2020). Gut Microbiome. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2782-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2782-1
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