This study, published Friday in the online journal PLoS One, is the first by Indiana University researchers working with a four-year, $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's Human Microbiome Project. It is also the first to reveal that urogenital bacterial communities of young men are surprisingly stable and that some of these bacteria are similar to species that colonize and protect healthy young women from sexually transmitted infections.
The research contradicts the accepted wisdom that pre-sexual men did not have bacteria in their urinary tracts.
