《经济学家》读译参考之十：不好消化-人生头道大餐乃细菌.docVIP

TEXT 29 Hard to digest 不好消化（陈继龙 编译） Jun 2nd 2006 From The Economist print edition BACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments[1], many people c________① bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements.（1） Such a smattering[2] of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this weeks Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself. 细菌和人一样也有敌我之分。有益的细菌有助于防治多种疾病已经得到证实，这使得许多人都食用细菌制成的酸奶以及补品。然而，人为地补充这么一点点，只能是杯水车薪。人消化道内生活着至少800种细菌。马里兰州洛克威尔基因组研究中心的史蒂文·吉尔及其同事们在本周《科学》杂志上发表的一篇研究报告认为，这些生物体有着庞大的宏基因组，所包含的基因总数是人类基因组的100倍。 Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the e_______② genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers. 吉尔博士和他的研究小组是通过提取两位志愿者粪便中的细菌DNA后得出这一结论的。鉴于标本的复杂性，他们无法重建消化道所有细菌的全部基因组，而只构建了个别基因。但这使得他们能够对基因总数作出估计。 What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify—the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. （2）So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are already known. 所有这些细菌的活动状况尚难以确定——细菌不易培养。所以，研究人员将所发现的基因与功能已经明确且已公布的基因数据库进行比较，从而推测出细菌“大概在干什么”。（译者按：tricky在此句中是指“something that is difficult to deal with or do because it is complicated and full of problems”，即“棘手的，难以处理的”。be up to在这里略显口语化，表示“doing something secret or something that you should not be doing”，“偷偷摸摸地做……”，比如：The children are very quiet. I wonder what theyre up to.孩子们很安静，我不知道他们到底在搞什