The Human Microbiome Project

A large project aimed at identifying the baseline of human microbial diversity has published a series of articles with the findings from the profiling of 15–18 different human sites from 242 healthy individuals. The project used a combination of 16S ribosomal sequencing and whole-genome sequencing. The articles published across the PLoS journals, Nature titles and Genome Biology vary from in-depth analyses of species composition and the metabolic pathways used by these microbes at various body sites to the development of new tools for these types of analyses.