From Science News:
New calculations suggest roughly equal populations, not 10-to-1 ratio
A “standard man” weighing 70 kilograms has roughly the same number of bacteria and human cells in his body, researchers report online January 6 at bioRxiv.org. This average guy would be composed of about 40 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, calculate researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That’s a ratio of 1.3 bacteria to every one human cell. More.
In case anyone wondered why they didn’t just take over…
See also: Evolution: Cells “hiring” functions they can’t do (endosymbiosis)
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