Nature: Identify thousands of new microbial communities in the human body

The human microbiome refers to the trillions of microbes that live on the surface and inside the bodyIn a new study on the human microbiome, researchers from the Harvard-Chen Zeng-hee School of Public Health, the Broad Institute, the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of California, San Diego, analyzed thousands of new microbiomes from the human gut, skin, mouth and vaginal microbiome to provide new insights into the role of these microbes in human healththe study is three times more than the human microbiome project at the National Institutes of Health( HUMAN Microbiome Project) and provides unprecedented depth and detail for human microbiodiversityThis new information allows people to identify the differences that are unique to the microbes that each person contains (just as some genomic variations are unique to everyone) and track their changes over time throughout the bodyThe findings were published online September 20, 2017 in the journal Nature with the headline "Strains, functions and dynamics in the expanded Human Microbiome Project""This study provides us with the most detailed information to date on which microorganisms and molecular processes help maintain the health of the human microbiome," said Curtis Huttenhower,and associate professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the Harvard-Chen Zeng-hee School of Public Health"theHuman Microbiome Program was launched in 2007 to identify and describe human microbesThe study, the second phase of the Human Microbiology Project, explores the relationship between human microbes and health and disease, and develops computational tools to analyze themThe human microbiome has been associated with everything from allergies to cancerthe researchers analyzed 1,631 new samples from 265 people from multiple body parts and multiple points in timeTo do this, they used DNA sequencing tools to accurately identify which microbes are present in multiple body parts and what role they may playStudying microbes at multiple points in time further allows them to determine which microbiomes may change slowly or rapidly over time, or are relatively stablethese findings include: (1) providing one of the largest non-bacterial members of the human body --- viruses and fungi --- database; The new study also highlights how scientists still don't know enough about the composition and function of the human microbiome, saidHuttenhowerHe says it will take time to learn more "Just as sequencing the human genome does not immediately lead to the development of a large number of new drugs or therapies, we need to study the human microbiome in a very detailed way in many different contexts so that we can understand and intervene in any individual change in any disease or symptom," said Jason Lloyd-Price, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute who , a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Chen Zenxi School of Public Health and a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute added that the study also provides a huge data resource for the scientific community, which will help advance future research, discover and develop new ways to study the human microbiome