DailyDirt: Sharing Our Microbes

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The human body harbors many more microbial cells than human cells. There are at least 10,000 different types of organisms on (and in) a healthy person, and finding out how our bodies interact with these microbes could help us understand how diseases are transmitted (or perhaps created). It's a huge task to study trillions of cells, so some microbiome projects are turning to crowdfunding and citizen scientists to help out. Here are just a few interesting links on the nascent field of mapping our microbial friends. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
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Filed Under: biology, citizen science, crowdfunding, human microbiome project, microbes, microbiome, science, ubiome
Companies: indiegogo, nih


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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 26 Dec 2012 @ 5:29pm

    NASA has been sending microbes to the moon and mars!

    The equipment to detect ever smaller amounts of living material has found that NASA's "clean rooms" aren't so sterile -- and we've been sending all kinds of life to the moon and mars. (And also on Voyager I & II...)

    Resistance is futile!

    link to this | view in thread ]


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