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
Comments on “DailyDirt: Sharing Our Microbes”
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!