Gut microbiota
community of microorganisms in the digestive tracts of humans
Gut microbiota, gut microbiome, or gut flora are the microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses, that live in the digestive tracts of animals. The gastrointestinal metagenome is the aggregate of all the genomes of the gut microbiota. The gut is the main location of the human microbiome. The gut microbiota has broad impacts, including effects on colonization, resistance to pathogens, maintaining the intestinal epithelium, metabolizing dietary and pharmaceutical compounds, controlling immune function, and even behavior through the gut–brain axis. Imbalances in the gut microbiota (dysbiosis) have been associated with numerous diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, certain cancers, and even neurological disorders, prompting increased efforts to develop microbiome-targeted therapies.
The microbial composition of the gut microbiota varies across regions of the digestive tract. The colon contains the highest microbial density of any human-associated microbial community studied so far, representing between 300 and 1000 different species. Bacteria are the largest and to date, best studied component and 99% of gut bacteria come from about 30 or 40 species. About 55% of the dry mass of feces is bacteria. Over 99% of the bacteria in the gut are anaerobes, but in the cecum, aerobic bacteria reach high densities.
“Gut microbiota” enters the record as community of microorganisms in the digestive tracts of humans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what microbiota, community and microorganisms can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Gut microbiota” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, microbiota, community and microorganisms provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q739734. The Library of Congress control number is sh85067595. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gut microbiota” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.