NIH launches Human Microbiome Project(t in the gut as well as provide us with ...)

Traditionally, microbiology has focused on the study of individual species as isolated units, making it difficult to develop and inventory all of the microbes in and on the human body. Because their growth is dependent upon a specific natural environment, its difficult to recreate microbe-host interactions in the laboratory. Advances in next generation DNA sequencing technologies relying on a process called metagenomic sequencing will be used. Instead of isolating each microbe, all of the DNA within the collected samples will be sequenced.

Our goal is to discover what microbial communities exist in different parts of the human body and to explore how these communities change in the presence of health or disease, said National Human Genome Research Institute Director, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., co-chair of the Human Microbiome Project Implementation Group. In addition, we will likely identify novel genes and functional elements in microbial genomes that will reshape the way we think about and approach human biology.

NIH recently awarded $8.2 million to four sequencing centers, to start building a framework and data resources for the Human Microbiome Project. One-year awards were given to the sequencing centers at the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, and Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, which are part of the NHGRI Large-Scale Sequencing Research Network; and the Broad Institute of MIT/ Harvard, Cambridge, Mass., and the J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Md., which are funded through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Microbial Genome Sequencing Centers Program.

The objectives of this initial work are to sequence the genomes of 200 microbes that have been isolated from the human body as part of the 1,000 microbial genomes collection. Researche
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