Human Microbiome Project, Data Analysis, and Coordination Center

Introduction

A variety of microbial communities (microbiomes) exist throughout the human body, with fundamental roles in human health and disease. The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund program that aims to characterize microbial communities found at multiple human body sites and to look for correlations between changes in the microbiome and human health.

Microbiome samples were collected from 300 healthy human subjects at multiple body sites including the gastrointestinal tract, oral cavity, nasopharyngeal tract, skin, and female urogenital tract and at multiple visits, for a total of over 11,000 samples. Both 16S rRNA gene and whole-genome shotgun sequencing were performed on a subset of samples. Extensive analysis was performed by the HMP Consortium on the metagenomic sequence data, including quality control processing, metadata standardization, assembly, structural and functional annotation, Gene Ontology profiling, metabolic...