OVERVIEW OF HUMAN MICROBIOME PROJECT

The Human Microbiome Project (HMP), launched by the National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research, is designed to fuel research into the human microbiome and to demonstrate correlations between changes in the microbiome and human health.

Microbiome is the totality of microbes, their genetic elements (genomes), and environmental interactions in a defined environment. A defined environment could, for example, be the gut of a human being or a soil sample. Thus, microbiome usually includes microbiota and their complete genetic elements.The expression microbiome was coined by Joshua Lederberg. . The microbiology of five body sites will be emphasized: oral, skin, vagina, gut, and nasal/lung.

Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one. These communities, however, remain largely unstudied, leaving almost entirely unknown their influence upon human development, physiology, immunity, and nutrition. To take advantage of recent technological advances and to develop new ones, the NIH Roadmap has initiated the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) with the mission of generating resources enabling comprehensive characterization of the human microbiota and analysis of its role in human health and disease

Traditional microbiology has focused on the study of individual species as isolated units. However many, if not most, have never been successfully isolated as viable specimens for analysis, presumably because their growth is dependant upon a specific microenvironment that has not been, or cannot be, reproduced experimentally. Among those species that have been isolated, analyses of genetic makeup, gene expression patterns, and metabolic physiologies have rarely extended to inter-species interactions or microbe-host interactions.

1. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies have created a new field of research, called metagenomics, allowing comprehensive examination of microbial communities, even those comprised of uncultivable organisms. Instead of examining the genome of an individual bacterial strain that has been grown in a laboratory, the metagenomic approach allows analysis of genetic material derived from complete microbial communities harvested from natural environments. In the HMP, this method will complement genetic analyses of known isolated strains, providing unprecedented information about the complexity of human microbial communities
   
   Broadly, the project has set the following goals:
   
   1. Determining whether individuals share a core human microbiome
   2. Understanding whether changes in the human microbiome can be correlated with changes in human health
   3. Developing the new technological and bioinformatic tools needed to support these goals
   4. Addressing the ethical, legal and social implications raised by human microbiome research.
   
   Notably, however, the utility of the techniques and technologies pioneered by the HMP will not be limited to studies of human health but will be applicable to the study of microbes in a wide range of biological processes. Microbes profoundly shape this planet and all life on it, and yet the test tube of the laboratory is rarely reflective of how they actually exist in the environment. The ability to study native microbial communities represents a fundamental shift in microbiology and is one whose implications can only be imagined.