Largest Human Microbial Group Plans to Submit Papers

Posted by Grace Melly on June 3rd, 2019

HMP found that thousands of microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi) live in our bodies and bacterial genome sequencing and fungal genome sequencing are of great positive significance to human survival.

As a symbiotic life with human beings, the microbes in the human body are counted in the order of trillions. They are born when we are born. We carry bacteria from our mothers. They advance and retreat with mankind, but we know little about such loyal partners. In 2007, under the command of the National Institutes of Health, the largest human microbial exploration project in history—the Human Microbiology Group Program (HMP) was born. After 12 years, HMP entered the second phase of the project, handing over three answers, while Nature also gave a highest courtesy cover photo of a close partner's.

In the past decade or so, the scientific community has invested more than .7 billion in human microbial research. Most of which have come from the United States, Europe, China and other regions. Such a huge fund and research chain reflect the concern of scientists for human microbes. Previous breakthroughs have also been made in the field of microbiology, such as the fact that newborns get critical microbiota from their mothers, undigested carbohydrates in milk can promote the growth of microorganisms in the intestines and stomach of infants, and after the growth of microorganisms, it can in turn enhance the immune system function of infants. Unfortunately, these scattered studies are difficult to clarify the relationship among microbial population, human body and disease.

But this awkward situation took a turn in the early 21st century. Since 2005, the cost of human genome resequencing technology has gradually begun to decline. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to carry out a large-scale research program for human microbial populations. In 2007, The United States had invested 0 million to launch the huge Human Microbiology Program (HMP), which aimed to advance the development of more advanced microbial fields, including updating computing and analytical tools, clinical standards, and establishing microbiological reference databases.

The first phase of the HMP program mainly refers to the research progress from 2007 to 2016. In this stage, the main purpose of the study was to analyze the microbial population in five parts of the body, including oral cavity, skin, nasal cavity, gastrointestinal tract and genitourinary tract, in order to explore whether the fixed microbial community is related to specific diseases of the human body. In the first stage, HMP established clinical sample standards for five major sites. In addition, HMP has also established the whole genome sequence of all kinds of microorganisms, which can be obtained directly on NCBI at present.

In these 10 years, a number of studies have observed the characteristics of the microbial population in the five major parts of the body and found that the signal pathway associated with body metabolism was subject to microbial control of different populations. In particular, these parts had a disease-related population, and the micro-organisms in the disease area were different from the normal person, for example, the intestinal flora of the Crohn's disease is obviously different from that of the normal person, and the microbial metabolic pathway is not the same.