The Microbiome: The Second Genome

The term microbiome was first used by WIP's Lewis and Cook in their 1988 paper on the relationships between plants and their resident microorganisms. In 2001, a molecular biologist at Rockefeller wrote a piece in The Scientist that brought the term to medical popularity. Letterberg accidentally redefined it as an ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space. Our bodies are like massive ecosystems, home to bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Our organisms make up our microbiome.