Each one of us carries about 38 trillion bacteria around with us in our gut every day—if you wanted to count them all, it would take you more than a million years. How can such a veritable zoo of microbes reside peacefully in our guts without triggering our immune systems to attack them, as do “bad” bacteria that cause disease? The answer lies in the intestinal mucosal barrier, which includes tightly connected epithelial cells that line the intestine, a layer of dense mucus that protects those cells from bacteria and other gut contents, and immune cells underneath the epithelial cells that quickly kill any microbes that penetrate the barrier.
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