Sequencing the Human Microbiome

描述(申请人提供)：人体微生物群是指定植于人体的微生物的集合。在过去的一年里，对250名健康受试者的微生物组进行了分析，重点放在五个身体部位(鼻、口腔、阴道、皮肤和肠道)和许多亚部位。这项研究开始建立一个居住在人体内的可培养细菌的基因组序列目录，并描述由微生物物种组成的群落结构，从而能够评估身体部位之间和个人之间的多样性。这项研究的目标是在多个方向上扩展这些初始探针。这项研究将通过使用自动化方法分离生物和高通量DNA测序来构建基因组序列，将1000个基因组添加到人类微生物组的细菌参考序列目录中。这项研究还将通过直接比较微生物组中生物的DNA序列，进一步表征250个人的元基因组，从而确定受试者之间的共同点或变异点。除了细菌，该项目还将描述病毒群(由病毒形成的人类微生物群的组成部分)的特征，并对人类微生物群中的真核微生物进行普查。最后一个目标是分析在元基因组群落中发现的微生物的转录模式，并通过这种方法确定在不同的身体利基中表达哪些功能。这些研究将促进我们对健康受试者中人类微生物组的日益增长的了解，为疾病研究提供基线，并为探测微生物组提供新的工具。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The human microbiome is the collection of microorganisms that colonize the human body. Over the last year the analysis of the microbiome of 250 healthy subjects was initiated, focusing on five body sites (nasal, oral, vaginal, dermal, and gut) and many subsites. This study began to build a catalog of genome sequences of culturable bacteria that inhabit the human body as well as described the community structure formed by microbial species, allowing diversity to be assessed between body sites and between individuals. The goal of this study is to extend these initial probes in multiple directions. The study will add 1,000 genomes to the catalog of bacterial reference sequences of the human microbiome by using automated methods to isolate organisms and high throughput DNA sequencing to construct genome sequences. The study will also further characterize the metagenomes of the 250 individuals by directly comparing DNA sequences from organisms in the microbiome, thus deterimining what is common or variant between subjects. Going beyond bacteria, the project will characterize the virome, the component of the human microbiome formed by viruses, and take a census of eukaryotic microbes in the human microbiome. The last goal is to analyze the transcriptional patterns of microbes found in metagenomic communities, and by this means determine what functions are expressed in the different body niches. These studies will advance our growing knowledge of the human microbiome in healthy subjects, providing a baseline for disease studies as well as new tools for probing the microbiome.