Mycobiota is a term resulting from the contraction of “mycology”, a discipline devoted to the study of fungi, and “microbiota”. It was used for the first time in 1995. The number of these fungal cells is much lower than that of bacterial cells: it is estimated that the human intestinal mycobiota represents approximately 0.1% of the microbial communities of the digestive tract.
Fungi are eukaryotic cells (with a nucleus) whose metabolism is more complex than that of bacteria (prokaryotes, cells without a nucleus) and between ten and a hundred times larger than them.
The mycobiota is a component of a larger whole, the microbiota, made up of bacteria, archaea, fungi, protozoa (parasites) and viruses that colonize different ecosystems of the human body. There are therefore various microbiota: in the digestive tract, skin, mouth, vagina, lungs. The intestinal microbiota is the most abundant.
The fungal community is more abundant and diverse in the lower part of the digestive tract than in its upper part. In the lower part of the digestive tract, there are on average, per gram of faecal matter, between one hundred thousand and one million fungal cells against ten billion bacterial cells.
At the end of 2022, 1,716 scientific publications on the mycobiota were referenced in PubMed, a bibliographic database in biomedical sciences, compared to 131,698 on the bacterial microbiota, mainly intestinal.
Human beings are exposed to a considerable number of fungi in the environment, especially in food and in the air. The influence of diet on the intestinal mycobiota is widely documented. The abundance of Candida in the stool is associated with a high carbohydrate diet. This fungus is on the other hand less present during a diet rich in proteins or fatty acids.