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.

• The American Gut project is looking to raise $400,000 to create an open source collection of data on the diversity of microbes in our digestive systems. This project is also looking for donations of biological samples to analyze.... [url]
• uBiome is also collecting samples from volunteers to analyze and create a map of human microbe diversity. The data will be HIPAA compliant, and no personal information will be released -- and you're already spreading your personal flora around everywhere you go anyway. [url]
• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has an on-going Human Microbiome Project that catalogs microbial communities that live on the human body. So far, this research has gathered data on the microbes living on 200+ healthy volunteers. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: biology, citizen science, crowdfunding, human microbiome project, microbes, microbiome, science, ubiome
Companies: indiegogo, nih