The Inhabited Body — Companion Primer

The Science You Need (But Were Never Taught)

A Companion Guide to The Inhabited Body: The Science of Our Microbial Selves

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why This Primer Exists — and who it is for

Primer Chapter 1: The Living World — Life's Major Domains What it means to be alive. The three domains of cellular life — Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. Where viruses, prions, and other non-cellular entities fit. The map you need before exploring the microbiome.

Primer Chapter 2: The Cell — Life's Basic Unit Prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells. Membranes, walls, and the internal architecture of life. Why your cells and bacterial cells are built on fundamentally different plans — and how that matters for medicine.

Primer Chapter 3: The Code of Life — DNA, RNA, and Proteins What DNA actually is. How genes become proteins: transcription and translation in plain language. What mRNA does (and why you heard so much about it during the pandemic). A brief look at epigenetics — how genes can be switched on and off without changing the underlying code.

Primer Chapter 4: The Fungal Kingdom — Your Closest Strangers A guide to the fungi: yeasts, moulds, and mushrooms. How fungi differ from bacteria and from plants. Why they matter for the human mycobiome — and why they are so often overlooked.

Primer Chapter 5: Viruses and Their Strange Relatives Viruses, bacteriophages, proviruses, retroviruses, and the recently discovered obelisks. Why phages are major players in the microbiome. The concept of lysogeny. Why viruses are not "alive" in the traditional sense — but still matter enormously.

Primer Chapter 6: How We Study What We Can't See Microscopy, culturing, 16S rRNA sequencing, metagenomics, metabolomics, and culturomics. A gentle overview of the toolkit so that readers understand how claims in the main book are actually evidenced — and what the limitations are.

Glossary

Primer Bibliography

Chapter Status