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Have you ever wondered what are microbes? Are they.… animals? Bacteria? Consumers? Thanks to Google, we know you have! We found the most commonly searched microbial questions, from A to Z, and put them to Rob DeSalle and Susan Perkins, curators of the Museum's new exhibition about the human microbiome. 

Pucker up! When you give someone a kiss, you're exchanging more than love—you're also exchanging microbes. 

Recently, Women of @marvel's Judy Stephens welcomed Susan Perkins, Professor and Curator of "The Secret World Inside You" at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, to her weekly podcast.

Happy Valentine’s Day from the American Museum of Natural History! We’re celebrating the holiday like mature adults, with gross facts about kissing. 

Happy Friends Day! Approximately 100 trillion friends are much closer than you think...all over your body. 

Your body is an ecosystem of microbes, composed of 10,000 different species. Genetically we get even less real estate: 99 percent of the unique genes in our bodies are bacterial. This population of microorganisms has evolved along with homo sapiens to help orchestrate basic life processes, beginning the moment we’re born.

Meet some of these friendly microbes:

Are microbes dangerous?

Not as dangerous as we used to think.

The grand majority of microbes are either not in contact with us or, if they are in contact with us, they’re actually mutualistic, which means that we gain a benefit from them, they gain a benefit from us. Or they’re simply neutral.

They’re dangerous when we make them dangerous. We make them dangerous through antibiotic overuse. Antibiotics change the makeup of the microbial ecology in the gut, especially, and that change in microbial makeup triggers a bunch of secondary reactions and interactions.

Discoveries by scientists like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Koch connected microbes to infectious disease. These discoveries formed a way of thinking called “germ theory” that said a specific microbe caused a specific disease. With widespread use of antibiotics beginning in the 1940s, people zealously tried to rid their lives of any and all microbes, spreading the anti-microbial mindset to personal and household cleaning.

But today, scientists are starting to reevaluate germ theory. Using antibiotics to treat bad germs will remain an essential, life-saving part of medicine. But repeated or unnecessary use of antibiotics prevents our bodies from establishing the community of microbes it needs. Scientists now suggest that we look at microbes in context, understanding that microbes (Helicobacter pylori, for example) can be both beneficial and harmful

Overusing antibiotics has pushed microbes to evolve resistance, making them less available for general health care or surgical procedures. Clostridium difficile (pictured) is an example of a strongly antibiotic-resistant microbe. Successful treatment of C. diff. happens when a patient’s gut community comes back into balance, often by introducing a new microbial community from the stool of a healthy donor.