"There's! A! Flea, on the fly, on the wart, on the frog, on the bump, on the log--" Does anyone else remember this song? Because it has been going through my head ever since I started reading about the human virome. That's the viruses that live inside the bacteria that live inside us.
First there was the genome--all the DNA in a human--which we've now got a pretty good handle on. It turned out that our smallish number of genes can be shuffled into a larger number of RNA "transcripts," so there's also the transcriptome. Those transcripts are used to make the proteins in our body, naturally known as the proteome. The microbiome is all of the microorganisms that live inside humans. (Don't look now, but there are 10 times more of their cells than yours in your body.) And the virome goes a step more microscopic, to the viruses.
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