Grant: Project Grant

The human body is colonized by a diverse community of microorganisms (mostly bacteria but also fungi and viruses) - the human microbiome. In some ways we are more them than us with more bacterial cells than our own and 100-1000 more bacterial genes than human genes. We know that the microbiome is critical for health and an imbalance in the microbiome is associated with gastrointestinal diseases, asthma, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression. Most studies of the microbiome rely on DNA sequencing and it is a widely held belief that most of the human microbiome is not readily cultured in the laboratory. We have challenged that dogma and established methods that allow growth of almost all of the human microbiome. Our results reveal more complexity is obtained by culturing than by sequencing alone. We propose that to fully exploit the biological potential of the microbiome and to validate hypotheses generated from culture-independent studies, we need to develop robust and high throughput methods for culturing and characterizing the microbiome and that is the focus of this proposal. Here we propose to expand our efforts to develop comprehensive strain and sequence libraries of the human microbiome as a resource for the research community and to explore our cultures collections for the discovery of novel antibiotics, immunomodulators, and probiotics.