New findings overturn 100-year-old assumption about common bacteria in the lungs

Automated news aggregation. Headlines and summaries are gathered from public feeds; see our editorial standards for sourcing, corrections, and AI-assist disclosure.

The human body is teeming with more than 35 trillion bacteria, coexisting in microbiomes inside the gut, mouth, lungs, skin and urogenital tract. While it's now clear these microbes are associated with health and disease, scientists have only begun to uncover the full scale of their biology and functions.