Contributed by Nguyet Kong
The Earth Microbiome have collected more than 27,000 samples from all around the world. They have analyzed the microbes and microbiomes and recently published a paper in Nature. The director for the Center for Microbiome Innovation, Dr. Rob Knight welcome the mini-symposium UCSD hosted on November 1, 2017, and reported the project in the Nature publication where the work started in 2010 with more than 300 researchers involved. They wanted to produce the first reference database of bacteria colonizing the world.
The Earth Microbiome Project goal was to sample as many communities as possible to get a better understanding of the microbes and the environment. The researchers have noticed the microbiomes of the hosts are more similar to each other than the environment they live in. The sample type includes humans, animals, and plants from the Arctic to Antarctic. The bacterial diversity was evaluated looking at 16S rRNA genes and have identified more than 300,000 unique microbial 16S rRNA sequences with 90% not having a match with any current database.
References:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/mapping-earths-microbiome
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24621
