Monmouth Microbiome Initiative

NMI

"Today (May 13, 2016), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with Federal agencies and private-sector stakeholders, is announcing the National Microbiome Initiative (NMI). The NMI aims to advance understanding of microbiomes in order to aid in the development of useful applications in areas such as health care, food production, and environmental restoration."

Taken from https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/13/announcing-national-microbiome-initiative

http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/05/White-House-announces-microbiome-initiative.html

Seminal articles of interest:

A unified initiative to harness Earth’s microbiomes (2015)

Despite their centrality to life on Earth, we know little about how microbes (Viruses, bacteria, archaea, microscopic fungi, and protists) interact with each other, their hosts, or their environment. Although DNA sequencing technologies have enabled a new view of the ubiquity and diversity of microorganisms, this has mainly yielded snapshots that shed limited light on microbial functions or community dynamics. Given that nearly every habitat and organism hosts a diverse constellation of microorganisms—its “microbiome”— such knowledge could transform our understanding of the world and launch innovations in agriculture, energy, health, the environment, and more (see the photo). We propose an interdisciplinary Unified Microbiome Initiative (UMI) to discover and advance tools to understand and harness the capabilities of Earth’s microbial ecosystems.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/507

Host-Bacterial Mutualism in the Human Intestine (2005, Highly cited)

The distal human intestine represents an anaerobic bioreactor programmed with an enormous population of bacteria, dominated by relatively few divisions that are highly diverse at the strain/subspecies level. This microbiota and its collective genomes (microbiome) provide us with genetic and metabolic attributes we have not been required to evolve on our own, including the ability to harvest otherwise inaccessible nutrients. New studies are revealing how the gut microbiota has coevolved with us and how it manipulates and complements our biology in ways that are mutually beneficial. We are also starting to understand how certain keystone members of the microbiota operate to maintain the stability and functional adaptability of this microbial organ.