Avian Flu Diary: NIH: News From The Human Microbiome Project

Photo Credit HMP

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Last year in The Other Reason Not To Abuse Antibiotics I touched briefly on beneficial intestinal bacteria (gut flora or microbiota), and how the use of antibiotics can adversely disrupt their balance.

The study of these ubiquitous micro-organisms that reside not only in our intestines, but on our skin, in our nasal passages, oral cavities, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract has gained momentum over the past several years.

One of the big reasons is the NIH sponsored Human Microbiome Project, which defines their goal as:

The Common Fund's Human Microbiome Project (HMP) aims to characterize the microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body, including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract, and to analyze the role of these microbes in human health and disease. HMP includes the following initiatives.

Today, in advance of the publication today and tomorrow of a number of research articles in PLoS and in the journal Nature, we’ve a couple of lengthy press releases describing this international project’s recent accomplishments, along with an announcement on the PLoS Blog of the availability of this collection.

First, from the NIH – news that researchers have defined the normal bacterial makeup of the human body.

NIH Human Microbiome Project defines normal bacterial makeup of the body

Genome sequencing creates first reference data for microbes living with healthy adults

Microbes inhabit just about every part of the human body, living on the skin, in the gut, and up the nose. Sometimes they cause sickness, but most of the time, microorganisms live in harmony with their human hosts, providing vital functions essential for human survival. For the first time, a consortium of researchers organized by the National Institutes of Health has mapped the normal microbial makeup of healthy humans, producing numerous insights and even a few surprises.

Researchers found, for example, that nearly everyone routinely carries pathogens, microorganisms known to cause illnesses. In healthy individuals, however, pathogens cause no disease; they simply coexist with their host and the rest of the human microbiome, the collection of all microorganisms living in the human body. Researchers must now figure out why some pathogens turn deadly and under what conditions, likely revising current concepts of how microorganisms cause disease.

In a series of coordinated scientific reports published on June 14, 2012, in Nature and several journals in the Public Library of Science (PLoS), some 200 members of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium from nearly 80 universities and scientific institutions report on five years of research. HMP has received $153 million since its launch in fiscal year 2007 from the NIH Common Fund, which invests in high-impact, innovative, trans-NIH research. Individual NIH institutes and centers have provided an additional $20 million in co-funding for HMP consortium research.

“Like 15th century explorers describing the outline of a new continent, HMP researchers employed a new technological strategy to define, for the first time, the normal microbial makeup of the human body,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “HMP created a remarkable reference database by using genome sequencing techniques to detect microbes in healthy volunteers. This lays the foundation for accelerating infectious disease research previously impossible without this community resource.”

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In another press release from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, we get details on how this research was conducted, and the surprising individuality and diversity among health human biomes.

Human Microbiome Project finds vast individuality in healthy human bacterial populations

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To define the normal human microbiome, HMP researchers sampled 242 healthy U.S. volunteers (129 male, 113 female), collecting tissues from 15 body sites in men and 18 body sites in women (including three vaginal sites). Researchers collected up to three samples from each volunteer at sites such as the mouth, nose, skin (two behind each ear and each inner elbow),and lower intestine (stool).

Where doctors had previously isolated only a few hundred bacterial species from the body, HMP researchers now calculate that more than 10,000 species occupy the human ecosystem. Moreover, researchers calculate that they have found between 81 and 99 percent of all the genuses of microorganisms in healthy adults.

Defining "a" human biome, however, can be difficult, as HMP researchers found immense variation in bacterial communities, both in bacterial diversity and in bacterial group abundances -- variation that includes population differences both between areas in each body and between similar areas in different bodies.

Each body site can be inhabited by organisms as different as those in the Amazon Rainforest and the Sahara Desert. Further, these sites on different individuals are populated with different assemblages of bacteria, or with some of the same bacteria, but in markedly different proportions.

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From the Public Library of Science Blog we get details on this expanding collection of research.

Announcing the Human Microbiome Project Collection

Posted on June 13th, 2012 by Jen Laloup

For the first time, a consortium of researchers has mapped the full community of microbes that inhabit various parts of the healthy human body. Many of these findings will be published today in a new PLoS collection. The PLoS Human Microbiome Project Collection consists of articles from the project’s consortium members, who generate, leverage, and explore microbiome analytical techniques. The articles have been culled from PLoS ONE, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Computational Biology with more being added to the collection as they are published.

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