cientists can now predict how individual bacteria in the gut interact with each other to reveal how they affect our health – for better or worse. The trillions of microbes and viruses that coexist inside and on the surface of the body are collectively known as the microbiome. The largest concentrations of these, others, such as toxic strains of , can cause disease. Many microbes survive by consuming nutrients that have been produced by other microbes, and when these interactions break down, it can cause an imbalance between helpful and disease-causing microbes that leads to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, until now it has been difficult to map out all of these complex interactions.
