In the Earth Microbiome Project, an extensive global team has collected more than 27,000 samples from numerous, diverse environments around the globe. They analyzed the unique collections of microbes -- the microbiomes -- living in each sample to generate the first reference database of bacteria colonizing the planet.
The
Earth Microbiome Project was founded in 2010 by Rob Knight, PhD, professor at
UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Center for Microbiome
Innovation at UC San Diego; Jack Gilbert, PhD, professor and faculty director
of The Microbiome Center at University of Chicago and group leader in Microbial
Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory; Rick Stevens, PhD, associate laboratory
director at Argonne National Laboratory and professor and senior fellow at
University of Chicago; and Janet Jansson, PhD, chief scientist for biology and
laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Knight, Gilbert and
Jansson are also co-senior authors of the Nature paper and Stevens is a
co-author.
The
goal of the Earth Microbiome Project is to sample as many of the Earth's
microbial communities as possible in order to advance scientific understanding
of microbes and their relationships with their environments, including plants,
animals and humans. This task requires the help of scientists from all over the
globe. So far, the project has spanned seven continents and 43 countries, from
the Arctic to the Antarctic, and more than 500 researchers have contributed to
the sample and data collection. Project members are using this information as
part of approximately 100 studies, half of which have been published in
peer-reviewed journals.
Project
members analyze bacterial diversity among various environments, geographies and
chemistries by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene, a genetic marker specific for
bacteria and their relatives, archaea. The 16S rRNA sequences serve as
"barcodes" to identify different types of bacteria, allowing researchers
to track them across samples from around the world. Earth Microbiome Project
researchers also used a new method to remove sequencing errors in the data,
allowing them to get a more accurate picture of the number of unique sequences
in the microbiomes.
Within
this first release of data, the Earth Microbiome Project team identified around
300,000 unique microbial 16S rRNA sequences, almost 90 percent of which don't
have exact matches in pre-existing databases. Pre-existing 16S rRNA sequences
are limited because they were not designed to allow researchers to add data in
a way that's useful for the future.
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Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle
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