Journal Club
This fall, the Natural Sciences Journal Club will focus on papers related to the Human Microbiome Project.
Upcoming Meetings:
The Natural Sciences Journal Club is on hiatus until next Fall. Consider joining our Spring Reading Club. Along with students from the social work department, we are reading the intriguing book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. We meet every Thursday morning at 10:20 a.m. in Centennial Center 103. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Rogers at aebtref+znybar+rqh.
The Human Microbiome Project Collection
The healthy adult body hosts ten times as many microbial cells as human cells, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and eukaryotic microbes resident on nearly every body surface. The metagenome carried collectively by these microbial communities dwarfs the human genome in size, and their influences on normal development, diet and obesity, immunity, and disease are under active research.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund, the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) was established to provide a comprehensive baseline of the microbial diversity at 18 different human body sites. This includes reference genomes of host-associated microbial isolates, 16S rRNA marker gene sequencing for thousands of healthy microbiomes, 3.5Tb of metagenomic sequences, assemblies, and metabolic reconstructions, and a catalogue of over 5M microbial genes. These data join resources generated by computational tool development for analysis of the microbiome, research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of the microbiota, technology development for investigating these microbial communities, and a range of disease-focused microbiome demonstration projects. All resources generated by the Human Microbiome Project are publicly available at: hmpdacc.org.
The Human Microbiome Project Collection encompasses publications from consortium members generating, leveraging, and exploring these resources. Articles are presented in order of publication date and new articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.
PLoS Collections: The Human Microbiome Project Collection (2012) ploscollections.org/hmp
Image Credit: National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
In Good Health? Thank your 100 trillion bacteria.
