This week marks the tenth anniversary of the first major biological study of the human body, by the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium, of which I am a member. Microorganisms are a mixture of bacterial scalp, as well as archaea, fungi and bacteria, which spread to the skin, mouth and intestines together and are called the microbiome . But until 2012, we did not have a list of them.
In fact, this sets the stage for the trillion cells of living organisms, weighing about 200 ounces [200 g] per person. It is time to build on this first project and redesign the project to represent humanity in all its challenges.
It took a long time to start that original project, and the pace of change over the past decade has been amazing. Once upon a time high-level genetic technology – which was first developed for human genetic research, was cheap and easy enough to use where HMP could start. After its launch in 2007, the consortium tracked DNA from within 22 people from 2 US. The cities of Boston, Massachusetts, and Houston, Texas, have chosen to be close to two major consecutive institutions at the time, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard near Boston, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Our work is funded by the US National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund, and the project has attracted microbiome bioinformatics education professionals to work on data after we have produced it.
The result was the first complete catalog of a healthy US microbiome: a complete list of genes in the intestinal tract. HMP has shown that living cells of the gut cell include thousands of species of living things, with a gene 150 times the size of the human genome. Eventually, this nala led biologists to view the microbiome as a ‘second genome’ found in the environment, hidden from man. Ten years on, we know a lot more. The microbiome is essential for the proper functioning of our body, the key to digestion and to prevent infection. Studies in mice have shown that microbiome formation affects levels of social involvement and anxiety. Common diseases such as heart disease and obesity are linked to different microbiomes. How children get their microbiomes – and what influences the growth of microbiomes – is also becoming clear.
We have a lot of unanswered educational questions, too. Where did the microbiome originate from human evolution? How are human microbiomes different from other primates, mammals or animals in general? How do microbiomes move from person to person? And what it means to change diets and healthy lifestyles for the longevity of the microbiome. We now know that people living in Europe and North America have slightly different microbiomes than people living in less developed areas but very little is known about differences in human groups.
And very little is known about the abundance of other animals themselves that contain bulk. We know that the microbiomes of captive animals are different from those of wild animals, in much the same way that the microbiomes of developed humans differ from those of non-industrial ones. But much of what we know about animal viruses comes from studies of captive animals. As we lose the diversity of animals in the rapid evolution of the world, we also lose the diversity of the microbiome.Learning further will require a new consortium, taking samples of thousands of people and animals. We need wildlife biologists and microbiome scientists who work together, with workers around the world. Ten years ago, the analysis was so new and difficult that we did not stop thinking about sample acquisition. Now, sampling from sources around the world should lead the process.
Some may wonder why we need a new, larger, more expensive alliance when data is already easily accessible – one study at a time, conducted by laboratories that work independently. But industrial development is fast-paced, and modern economic power has the potential to eliminate biological diversions more quickly than previously thought. It’s like a census: you don’t wait for each city to report their population; make one concerted effort to do it consistently and quickly, before it changes.A large new analysis of the diversity of the human microbiome, as well as the microbiome of vertebrates, will eventually place our own species data in the context of the tree of life. Only then can we truly extend the label ‘man’ to the microbiome.
For more read the publication link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01610-5
