Our friend, the bacterium. Also our fried, the virus.
The diversity of species that make up the microbiome is hard to fathom. But it is even more difficult to understand how the immune system copes with this onslaught. In any one person’s mouth, for example, the scientists of the Human Microbiome Project found about 75 to 100 species. Some that predominate in one person’s mouth may be rare in another person’s. Still, the rate at which they are being discovered indicates that there may be as many as 5,000 species of bacteria that live in the human mouth.
via Studies of Human Microbiome Yield New Insights – NYTimes.com.