NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, RETO STOCKLI
With high-throughput analysis tools and bioinformatics on the rise, studying microbes has become more accessible to many researchers. In two papers published Wednesday (October 28)—one in in Nature, the other in Science—microbiologists penned their support for national and global initiatives to approach the many microbiome-related questions.
“What we’re trying to do is to coordinate ourselves in the same way that the physics community did several decades ago—think of lots of mini-CERNs,” Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist from the University of Chicago and a coauthor on the Science paper, told The Atlantic.
In Science, 48 researchers in the U.S. proposed the creation of an interdisciplinary Unified Microbiome Initiative (UMI) “to discover and advance tools to understand and harness the capabilities of Earth's microbial ecosystems.” They emphasized ...
