A Framework for Human Microbiome Research

Authors

Barbara A. Methe, J. Craig Venter Institute
Jacques Izard, Forsyth Institute and Harvard School of Dental MedicineFollow

ORCID IDs

Izard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5904-5436

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

6-14-2012

Citation

Nature (June 14, 2012) 486

doi: 10.1038/nature11209

Comments

Copyright 2012, Nature Publishing Group. Used by permission

Abstract

A variety of microbial communities and their genes (the microbiome) exist throughout the human body, with fundamental roles in human health and disease. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Human Microbiome Project Consortium has established a population-scale framework to develop metagenomic protocols, resulting in a broad range of quality-controlled resources and data including standardized methods for creating, processing and interpreting distinct types of high-throughput metagenomic data available to the scientific community. Here we present resources from a population of 242 healthy adults sampled at 15 or 18 body sites up to three times, which have generated 5,177 microbial taxonomic profiles from 16S ribosomal RNA genes and over 3.5 terabases of metagenomic sequence so far. In parallel, approximately 800 reference strains isolated from the human body have been sequenced. Collectively, these data represent the largest resource describing the abundance and variety of the human microbiome, while providing a framework for current and future studies.